Visualization Startup Hover Just Raised Another $25 Million To Digitize Home Renovation Planning

San Francisco-based startup HOVER, which uses smartphone photos of buildings to build 3D-visualizations for use by contractors and insurance companies, announced Thursday that it has raised an additional $25 million in capital through a Series C round led by Menlo Ventures. Prior investors also participated in the round, which brings the company’s total funding to $87 million. Menlo Ventures partner Matt Murphy will also be joining Hover’s board.

HOVER’s software allows homeowners, contractors or insurance adjusters to build a complete 3D-model of a home just by snapping photos with a smartphone at key locations. The model includes precise measurements, which makes it possible for contractors to more easily quantify materials for bids and for insurance companies to more accurately assess a damage claim to a home.

The company’s platform also makes these models interactive – so if a homeowner is interested in a renovation project, they could sit down with a contractor and cycle through options for style, material, color, and more. It has partnerships with the likes of Home Depot, materials distributor Beacon, and others, enabling contractors and homeowners to see pricing and materials options right on the app.

“When you have this digital twin data of a building, any project that needs to be scoped can be done in the cloud,” said cofounder and CEO A.J. Altman. “Effectively we can help professionals and eventually homeowners themselves buy these projects online.”

A veteran of Intel, the Department of Defense and the Marine Corps, Altman cofounded Hover in 2011, after having become fascinated by the possibilities of turning still, 2D-images into 3D-interactive models. “I met a couple of engineers who introduced me to photogrammetry and photo reconstruction in 2009 and got really excited about it. It’s not what they teach in undergrad CS,” he said.

After taking some time to build the app and getting it out to market, Altman says that the company has seen enormous growth, doubling the number of employees every year for the past two years. The goal of this capital raise is to keep hiring new people, with a dual goal of improving the customer experience on its app and building up its sales team.

One challenge to that growth, acknowledges new investor and board member Matt Murphy, is that contractors, renovators and insurance companies have been doing things in basically the same way for decades, and it can be difficult to convince people to try something new. That said, he thinks that Hover has an advantage there in that the software is fairly simple to use.

“You have to make it super simple and they have to feel an immediate or ROI or benefit,” Murphy said. “I think HOVER nails that.”

Making the software simple to use, acknowledges Altman, is a key part of the company’s strategy. Its long-term goal is ambitious – the company wants homeowners to use its app as just another part of being a homeowner. But it order to do that, he said, he’s been laser-focused on making it worthwhile.

“We built this technology so that if we can take this thing in everyone’s pocket so that someone like my mother can walk out and take a few photos, she would if we could offer with that 3D experience some practical ways to maintain the largest asset in her life,” Altman said.

This post first appeared on Forbes.com. To see the original, click here.