In the summer of 2020, a fire broke out onboard a naval ship docked in San Diego Bay. For more than four days, the USS Bonhomme Richard burned as helicopters dropped buckets of water from above, boats spewed water from below, and firefighters rushed onboard to control the blaze. Before the embers had even cooled, lidar (Light Detection and Ranging) scans were taken to assess how bad the damage was and to figure out how the fire even started.

But the investigation was stalled, partially because of how hard it is to send lidar scans.

Today’s leading cloud storage services — Google Drive, DropBox, iCloud, and OneDrive — don’t support the massive three dimensional files (sometimes, multiple terabytes in size) used with lidar technology. The naval unit in San Diego was forced to overnight thumb drives and Blu-ray discs, containing lidar scans of the charred naval ship, to authorities around the country.

That’s what inspired U.S. Army veteran Clark Yuan to launch Stitch3D, a browser-based platform that lets you view, share, annotate, interact with, and manage your large 3D files. Each file is stored as a “point cloud”: a collection of millions of discrete points with x, y, and z coordinate values that digitally represent a 3D scene. If Stitch3D existed, it may have been easier to send lidar scans of the USS Bonhomme Richard.

Stitch3D pitched on the Startup Battlefield stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024.

Yuan, who worked on lidar systems during his service, was helping the Navy improve its 3D modeling systems around the time disaster struck the USS Bonhomme Richard. This wasn’t the first time Yuan saw the inefficiencies of transmitting lidar files. In his Army days, Yuan remembers how some soldiers would run around with backups filled with hard drives holding lidar scans.

However, the U.S. military views lidar scans as critical in some situations, largely for preparing humans with accurate maps and equipment for a mission’s terrain.

Lidar creates 3D mappings of landscapes by measuring how long it takes light beams to bounce off a solid surface. Whereas aerial photos can only create 2D photos, lidar can show height or depth as well. The technology can show where large holes are in a battlefield, the elevation gain of a mountain, or the height of a building in a city. The advancement of drone technology has made it much easier to collect these lidar scans.

Stitch3D secured a $1.8 million grant from the Air Force to develop its technology in a secure way, alongside a $750,000 pre-seed round raised from friends and family. The Air Force wants to use it to measure coastal erosion for air bases in Florida or assess airfield damage after attacks.

However, Yuan sees Stitch3D as more than a military application.

In a demo with TechCrunch, Yuan shared how you could use Stitch3D’s platform to navigate around a detailed 3D map of a college campus. The platform allows you to view 3D maps from various angles, measure the dimensions of buildings and geographic features, and annotate different areas with notes and colors.

Yuan also says Stitch3D could be used by anyone else who uses lidar, including industries such as forestry, mining, architecture, land surveying, oil drilling, and more.

Augmented reality (AR) is another space Stitch3D could one day break into, using the lidar sensor on the back of your phone (yes, your phone has one) to create interactive scans of objects or rooms. Yuan said there’s a big uphill battle for developing that right now, and they’ve chosen not to because the technology is so young. However, one day, he could see how Stitch3D’s point clouds could be used with AR devices.