As we celebrate International Women’s Day 2023, we take a moment to reflect on the experiences of women in tech from Sensat’s lens.

 has set their focus on improving equality for women in tech, highlighting the ongoing challenges that women face in the industry.  In line with this theme, we spoke to some of our team about their experiences and the advice they would give to other women looking to join the industry.

At Sensat, we believe that diversity and inclusivity are essential to driving innovation across all industries serving diverse populations. And to support this, we are committed to empowering women in tech, starting from within our organisation. We recognise that in the industry there is still a long way to go in achieving gender equality, not just in tech but in all industries. As we look to the future, we are excited to see more women enter the tech industry.

We spoke to the Sensat team who reflected on their experiences in tech.

Lotte has been with Sensat for just under a year and pins her journey in Software Engineering on, “finding Maths-ey stuff quite satisfying”. Lotte studied Astrophysics at University which introduced her to her first bit of coding. This led to her doing a generalist Computer Science master's degree which gave her the confidence and grounding to apply for Software Engineering jobs.

What has your journey been like in Software Engineering?

“I joined the Software Engineering Graduate Scheme at Sky, where I was one of 3 women out of a cohort of 50, which was tough! There was a feeling of sticking out like a sore thumb, and I felt a lot of pressure to prove that not only was I individually capable of doing the work but that my gender as represented by me was worthy of the role. However, by the time I left, Sky had set up free coding boot camps for women career-changers, eventually bringing the gender balance on the Software Engineering scheme to around 50%.”

What advice would you give to your younger self?

“Find your allies and your mentors. Ask for support. When you’re in such a minority, especially starting out, you can end up feeling isolated, and in my experience, that’s an easy route to losing motivation and interest and feeling like you’re stagnating. The best way out of that is to talk about it, and find the people who can help you identify your strengths and advocate for yourself.”

Kat is Sensat’s Director of Product however her career didn’t start in Product. Kat initially pursued a career in TV/radio production but found the fast-paced, unstable nature of the industry wasn't for her. Kat underpinned that what she enjoyed about radio was researching and making things that brought happiness to others. She searched for a job that involved creativity, crafting things that would be used by others, and had an atypical office set-up.  Then she was hooked by a job advert in Product that basically read “we are some people in a room, we don’t know what we’re doing but we’re trying to build something and we’re going to have a lot of fun doing it”, and the rest was history.

How have you learnt to be an advocate for everyone’s voices when leading a team to make sure everyone is heard?

“I worked with a leadership coach for a couple of years and one of the takeaways was the importance of creating a space where everyone feels truly safe to be themselves, whether that was in a one-to-one setting or within a team setting. This is always something I try to bring to every role I have. Part of this is encouraging teams to get to really know each other beyond the everyday meetings so that there is an inherent level of trust that leads to everybody feeling confident that when they speak they will be listened to.

I also believe it is important to lead in a way that offers up equal opportunities in the day-to-day. I encourage a very open atmosphere within the team where everyone is aware of everything that is going on and everybody has an opportunity to get involved at different levels.”

One of the missions for 2023 IWD is improving the equality for women in tech, what do you think the industry can do to support this mission?

“I believe the culture that is sculpted within start-ups is incredibly important for equality. Those in the position of being able to influence culture should put equality front and centre. There are the more obvious areas that should be considered right from the beginning such as equal hiring, equal pay, equal opportunities, equal parental leave etc. But beyond this, it can be the everyday things that can lead to women feeling deterred from the industry. For example from the way the office has been designed to the way meetings are run to the perks that are offered. Although they may seem subtle these things need to be thought about inside and out to create an environment that is welcoming and fair to all.”

Kate began her journey with Sensat fresh from university as an Assistant Engineer on Sensat’s Data Capture team. “I have always loved working in the field and being hands-on. Joining the data capture team gave me ample opportunity to travel around the UK, learn new skills and manage projects on-site”, she explains. From this role, Kate has progressed into a project management role which complimented Kate’s previous experience in problem-solving and collaborating with teams.

What advice would you have for anyone who works on-site and is looking to be an ally to under-represented groups?

“I would say the first place to start is by being inclusive and welcoming to any new visitors to the site, regardless of who they are. I think that education is key to understanding the inequalities minority groups may face, and just engaging and recognising groups that may need additional support is a first step. And, if you do see something which seems wrong, don’t be a bystander, take action and say something. Suggestions for change are always accepted.

As a woman on site I have felt very welcomed and accommodated when visiting a new site, other site workers are often very friendly saying hello and offering help where needed. I have left a site with good impressions when the extra effort has been made to introduce you to site teams and share things such as facility locations.”

At Sensat, we believe that everyone should have an equal opportunity to succeed, regardless of their gender, race or background. We believe that by supporting and empowering women in tech, we can create a more diverse and inclusive industry that benefits everyone. Sensat is committed to creating a culture that values and welcomes diversity, and we will continue to challenge ourselves and our industry to do better.

Happy International Women’s Day 2023 from Sensat!

Celebrating women in tech

Critical infrastructure is often referred to as being the backbone of society and the economy—the economy needs reliable infrastructure to connect people, businesses, cities, supply chains, and keep industry moving. Without effective infrastructure, communities would be cut off.

But far from connectivity being solely physical, the networked activity that underpins infrastructure continues to grow at a rapid pace, as the Government’s 

 remarks, “The Digital World is a reality in all of our lives”. And the reality is, our dependency on cyberspace not only opens up huge opportunities, but also presents risks far beyond just surfing the web, shopping or social networking online.

As the world was forced to work from home in 2020, the pandemic turbo-powered widespread cloud-based communication and collaboration technology adoption. This included creating blocks of cyberspace that represent our physical world, and as such are fundamental to our national infrastructure’s resilience. As civil infrastructure moves more online, digital and physical systems are converging, making securing them more complex, and when any cyberattack aimed at civil infrastructure has the ability to put entire countries and communities at risk, protecting the systems that underpin our infrastructure projects is vital.

 found that 74% of organisations are not prepared for cyber attacks and do not have a response plan in place to protect them. The effects of a cyber attack on an infrastructure project, no matter the lifecycle stage, could have devastating effects, from exposing proposals or option selections, compromising the build strategy or leaving an asset vulnerable to attack endangering workers as well as the public.

At Sensat, we believe that cyber security must be central to any project so that the data powering and informing it is protected from crime as extreme as terrorism, but also other forms of criminality such as theft, ransomware, and those known as ‘hacktivits’. For your project, data breaches not only impact business and revenue, but can also inflict significant reputational damage. This is why at Sensat, we have a robust information security management system (ISMS) that protects our customers from risks such as these.

Today we celebrate Sensat’s renewal of our certification for ISO 27001 and explore how you can keep your data safe.

Of the data security accreditations, ISO 27001 is among the most widely recognized security standards in the world. ISO 27001 is the international standard and framework for information security which sets out the specification for an information security management system (ISMS). An ISMS is a set of policies, procedures, processes and systems that manage information risks, such as cyber attacks, hacks, data leaks or theft. This framework covers everything from the way we store client data, to best practices for risk assessment and mitigation and serves as an indication that our ISMS, at Sensat, is aligned with information security best practices.

Gaining accreditation is not a one time pass, an ISMS must be regularly updated to review risks and internal processes as well as avoid data breaches to be effective over time. ISO accreditation means that companies have to be regularly audited to ensure that they continue to comply with standards and our next external audit will be in October 2022.

What does having ISO 27001 mean for Sensat?

Our certification means that Sensat handles data (both our clients’ and our own) in accordance with international best practices in information security. This certification gives us international credibility, that we have identified the risks, assessed the implications and put in place systemised controls to limit any damage to our business, our platform services and our customers' data.

Increased reliability and security of systems and information

Improved foundation to our management processes as we continue to scale

What does Sensat’s ISO certification mean for our clients?

In short, ISO 27001 is a simple way of communicating our commitment to information security best practices to our customers, current and potential. If you are an existing client you won’t see any changes to Sensat’s platform or the way we do business. However, it does mean that anyone using Sensat can be confident that we:

Assess and mitigate all information security risks on a regular basis

Generally handle all information according to best practices

Sensat’s security management system (ISMS)

Our ISO 27001 certification means that when you choose our platform to host and visualise your data that it is safe in our hands. However, the ISO 27001 certification is just one of the many things Sensat upholds to ensure that your civil infrastructure information is safe and secure from cyber risks.

Certified to UK Government-backed scheme standards

Cyber Essentials is a Government-backed, industry-supported scheme to help organisations protect themselves against common online threats. Sensat is verified to UK Government-backed scheme standards which means we use:

Automated dependency vulnerability checks

Session hijacking/man-in-the-middle attack prevention

Regular penetration testing with an ‘IT Health Check’

Strong internal data access policies to keep your information in our platform secure from data risk

At Sensat we are focused on getting data into the right hands, but that also means ensuring that it doesn't fall into the wrong hands. We understand that project owners may not want to issue the same information rights for everyone involved in your project. Using Sensat, project owners are able to navigate three levels of permissions to ensure that all site data is shared in the right way:

Admins: have full rights and as such can upload files, invite new team members and perform all other actions within the platform.

Editors: cannot invite new team members, but can perform all other actions within the platform.

Contributors: cannot upload or access or download any files and they cannot invite new team members, but they can perform all other actions within the platform.

How can you keep your infrastructure data safe?

Defend the whole supply chain from cyber threat

With often several different stakeholders within projects, there is not only a need for internal cyber security standards to be upheld, but you must also ensure that anyone with whom you decide to work withholds similar security standards to yours. This can be a difficult and lengthy assessment, which is why looking for data security accreditations, such as ISO 27001, can be a painless solution to the problem.

A Common Visualisation Environment® (CVE)

Having a single repository for data and information, such as a CVE about any given project, not only optimises business process and provides a visual golden thread for planning and coordinating a project, but by streamlining systems and processes into a single repository, you’re able to more easily secure and protect all associated information. Utilising a single platform also offers communication between previously disconnected functions or organisations, resulting in higher productivity and efficiencies and presents an opportunity for greater governance over that information.

As critical infrastructure becomes more complex and reliant on networks of connected devices and we continue to have the need to organise and secure high volumes of data, companies should turn to one secure platform, and build privacy into their data operating models by default, or partner with a company that can protect them from data breaches.

If you have any questions regarding security and our platform and how we can help you visualise your project information then please feel free to get in touch with our team at 

Sensat renews ISO 27001 certification for safeguarding data that informs our infrastructure

As we round up the year, 2022 has been a year to celebrate for Sensat. With record numbers of users onboarded to our platform, $200bn billion worth of infrastructure supported, and our Series B funding announcement—it’s been quite a year.

Here are a few milestones we have celebrated in 2022.

This year we have processed more data than ever before—a mindblowing 589,186,015,768 points to be exact, in the form of point-clouds. If placed on a straight line at 50mm from each other, our point-cloud would be 77 times the distance between the earth and the sun.

Amongst 28,000 sessions, our users accumulated 596 days of time spent using Sensat. This has shown 170% growth since last 2021. Sectors that have accumulated the most time in the platform include Rail as well as Electricity Transmission. During this time spent on the platform, 8280 files have been uploaded and shared by our users equating to 600 GB of data.

Supporting some of the UK and Europe’s largest civil infrastructure projects, Sensat invited over 2,100 new users to our platform from January to December 2022. Today leaders in the civil infrastructure industry are working with Sensat to democratise information and inform better decisions across their projects. With more users having access to site information in context, teams are making better and more holistic decisions, together.

After saying goodbye to our old Sensat HQ in 160 Old Street after two short years (which felt even shorter due to the pandemic), we moved up the road to a space which we kitted out to be a bit more ‘Sensat’. Nicknamed 'The Dog on the Moon' and designed somewhat like a coffee shop, it has comfy collaboration spaces, a coffee bar, as well as a central stage for our latest product release announcements. It already feels like home.

This year, more than ever before, our customers have been the champions of Sensat and helped to bring use cases to life. Many of them have spent time collaborating with our product and engineering teams to help build new tools that they would use to more confidently make the right decisions.

As a thank you for their efforts we held a customer day and awards at our new office filled with user workshops, cross-team knowledge-sharing sessions and presentations from some of our customers this year. A huge thank you to everyone who joined, we can’t wait to see you at our next one.

Difficult not to mention our Series B raise! In 2017 from a kitchen in Islington Co Founders 

 founded Sensat. Five years on, Sensat has raised $20.5M (£16.7m) Series B funding led by National Grid Partners, one of the largest investor-owned energy companies in the world.

If you want to hear from Harry and James themselves, check out our 

Sensat officially launched in Australia this year. With an arm down in Australia our team has been working to support infrastructure projects to unlock the data in the context of the real world. Despite being a new territory and being less than 6 months in, the team have already made quite a splash!

With Sensat supporting infrastructure globally here is a light map showing the projects we are supporting right now.

. From the get-go, the goal was not to fit five days' worth of work into four, but instead to prioritise the tasks which really mattered and made a difference. 

Thanks to the 4-day working week our team is all the better for it. Using that extra day the team have been making the most of it with long weekends away in Berlin to even longer holidays to Borneo, as well as learning to paraglide, spend time with family and has even given some time for a part-time Master's degree in Geographic Data Science and Spatial Analytics!

With the year fast closing, we want to thank everyone who has been a part of our journey and mission this year. Sensat is excited to welcome in the new year with new projects, new users and some exciting announcements for 2023.

2022: A record-breaking year for Sensat

From the get-go, Sensat has held sustainability central to our mission to make construction more sustainable. Following this, we are proud to announce that we have become a B Corporation! 

This certification is just one way of showing our dedication to making a positive impact. We believe that business can be a force for good, and we will continue to work hard to make Sensat a leader in sustainable business practices.

What is a B Corp, and why does it matter?

, “Our most challenging global problems cannot be solved by governments and non-profits alone. By harnessing the power of their business, B Corps commit to positively impact all stakeholders – workers, communities, customers, and our planet.”

From this, Certified B Corporations (B Corps) were born back in 2006. B Corps are organisations that meet rigorous standards of social and environmental performance, accountability, and transparency. They use the power of business to solve social and environmental problems. There are currently over 

 in more than 70 countries and over 150 industries. B Corps are for-profit companies, but differ from traditional businesses because their purpose is to create a positive impact on society, not just to make money. B Corps are leaders in sustainable and responsible business practices.

As an organisation, Sensat has always been committed to operating in a sustainable and responsible manner. We believe that businesses have a responsibility to the planet and the people they serve. So, becoming a B Corp felt like a good way for us to externally demonstrate our commitment to Sensat's core values of sustainability and social responsibility.

Kat Maclean, Sensat’s Director of Product and Sustainability Sponsor explains:

 felt like a natural fit for Sensat. The certification process has been rigorous but that has only made it all the more rewarding. The assessment really made us look even deeper internally about ourselves as a sustainable and responsible organisation, what policies we have in place today for our people and planet, but also where we can be doing more.

Reflecting on construction, it is one of the most environmentally damaging industries in the world. And at Sensat we believe that innovation and technology has the power to be a force for good. By leveraging information and collaboration teams can make better, more informed decisions and reduce waste in order to reduce the damage caused.”

In order to achieve B Corp certification an in-depth assessment process is undertaken. Across 5 categories scoring is weighted across governance, workers, community, environment and customers - with dozens of questions in each. There are 200 points up for grabs and the threshold for becoming a B Corp is 80 points. Meanwhile, the average score across all businesses is 50.9.

Sensat was evaluated by the B Corp analysts and scored 113 points, which we are incredibly proud of. Our strongest scores fell into the categories of Workers, Governance and Environment. However, where there is always room for improvement, we will continue to work hard in all areas to boost our scores, especially as we mature as an organisation. B Lab requires organisations to recertify every 3 years, which means we have a great opportunity to beat our score next time.

To those thinking about certifying… buckle up because it is a long ride!

Engage early on and regularly with all the relevant stakeholders both in advance of, and during, the certification process, as you will require input from across the business on a number of topics. The more buy-in and support you get from the business, the smoother and more efficient the certification process will be. Dividing and conquering is key!

It is important to be able to back up the claims you make as part of the process and the answers you provide. Make sure you answer all questions truthfully and transparently; greenwashing will only lead to problems when it comes to presenting evidence and verification during the later stages of the process.

Finally, it is easier to become B Corp certified when you are still a small (yet fast-growing) business laying down the building blocks of your business model, as opposed to when you have become more rigid in structure.

 Employee Environmental Engagement Survey

 to gain an understanding of our colleagues' attitudes towards sustainability (both personally and how we are doing as a company). This helped us diagnose the current state of play of environmental engagement at Sensat: what we’re currently getting right as well as where there is room for improvement.

This assessment provided us with insight into how people at Sensat value sustainability. It revealed 93% of Sensat employees have a personal interest in sustainability whilst 60% of the team responded that sustainability was a factor or motivation for joining Sensat.

We believe that to be a sustainable business, we need a holistic approach to our environmental practices. It should be woven into our business strategy, practices and culture, as opposed to performing a ‘sustainability stunt’ or ‘greenwashing’. We want sustainability to be ‘baked in’ as opposed to ‘bolted on’.

Following the survey results, we have put some additional actions in place to improve our approaches, both in terms of our immediate impact, as well as environmental culture improvements. Initiatives include:

Monthly ‘Carbon Chats’ held by our internal environmental group, which focuses on creating an open forum to learn and discuss current climate issues (e.g. fast fashion and the geographies of food).

An internal audit of all collateral to make sure that we are transparent and truthful about our environmental commitments

Joined the construction sustainability group Zero

Fully supported remote working, thereby reducing the carbon footprints of our employees

Offset all of our emissions by tracking each and every data capture’s direct emissions.

Sensat is fueled by our mission to help construction become more sustainable. We believe that although construction is one of the world’s most polluting industries, it doesn’t have to be that way. By using Sensat your teams can leverage better decision-making, reduce rework and minimise their project’s carbon footprint from the get-go.

Learn how Sensat helped Octavius to save 7.4 tonnes of CO2 as a result of reduced site visits. 

Sensat joins the B Corp revolution

Options Appraisal can be a lengthy process when determining an optimal design route for new transmission lines, or location for a substation. Traditionally this has required multiple teams flicking between sheets, maps and applications. However, today teams are starting to explore digital twin technology as a way to expedite this process and make better first-time decisions.

Learn how digital twin technologies are set to revolutionise optioneering.

The optioneering of electricity transmission lines is a complex process that can be hindered by several challenges including

The lack of standardisation between data sources

When assessing design options for electricity transmission, the more context that can be used to inform plans, the better. However, the different file types, software licences and gatekeepers to information can make it difficult to assess multiple design options for electricity transmission.

Assessing multiple design options can be time-consuming, particularly due to the back-and-forth often required between designs. It is important to verify and validate the results within the real world to ensure that the best decision is made.

When you’re working towards strengthening an options appraisal for your project stakeholder buying is essential. A project team will need to consider the needs of landowners, environmental groups and local residents in order to get stakeholders on side. And, managing the expectations and objectives of these different stakeholders requires clear communication channels.

Digital twin revolutionising optioneering

Digital twins are being adopted in numerous different situations across infrastructure, but their potential use in optioneering is only just starting to be explored as an application. Digital twin platforms are enabling expedited optioneering by helping teams to gain a better understanding of how different options would interact with the real world. Using a base map of reality created using autonomous data capture methods such as UAVs, project teams can overlay potential designs and visually inspect them in the context of the real world as well as other data sets such as land boundaries or flood risks. Using this holistic view of the proposed design options in the context of reality, teams are more thoroughly exploring different scenarios to find the best possible option from a desktop.

Using digital twin software you can find the most efficient way to move power from Point A to Point B without the need to go back and forth to the site. From a single desktop platform, you can explore all of the different options to make the best decisions and balance technical, environmental, socio-economic and cost impact.

10 Benefits of leveraging digital twins in optioneering

Reduce risk and uncertainty from your desktop by layering and visualising all of your contextual data in one view you can reduce the risks and uncertainties associated with missing information.

Benefit from greater flexibility in uploading and testing different scenarios within the environment.

See options in the context of the real world:

 Input routing and siting options to see exactly how designs interact with the environment.

Viewpoints can be created automatically by digital twin platforms. For example, to assess how a design would affect the view from someone's house would no longer need specialist CAD drawers to draw up the viewpoint. Plans can be understood by the stakeholder and explored within a 3D environment.

The consulting teams can use the digital twin platform and its proposed designs to highlight risks early so that the project can progress faster.

Minimise the need to travel and visit remote sites. And, when boots are needed on the ground teams can arrive prepared for the environment and know exactly what to expect.

Take your plans from 2D to 3D so you can see if you have clearance over trees in the real world.

 your teams can gain a better understanding of a site from their desktop.

 you and your teams can upload and collaborate over information which others can leverage for enhanced decision-making.

Remove the flicking between different software: 

Use one digital environment to understand different layers of information within the wider context of the project.

What to look for in a digital twin platform for electricity transmission optioneering

: The accuracy of digital twins depends on the quality of the data used to create them. This means that optioneering with digital twins can only be as effective as the data that is put into it.

: There are some concerns about the security of digital twins, as they can provide a detailed view of sensitive infrastructure. Optioneering with digital twins will need to address these concerns to be successful. Any platform you use should be able to detail what security measures are used to keep your data safe such as ISO 27001 (

learn about Sensat’s security credentials)

: The cost of implementing a digital twin is not always viable for smaller-scale projects because of the initial inputs and investment needed to capture data.

Digital twins offer a promising option for optioneering electricity transmission projects. By optioneering with digital twins, it is possible to reduce the risks and uncertainties associated with optioneering in the real world. Where before teams relied on several tools to examine and present consultation, digital twin platforms are one method of bringing people and data sources together to bridge the technical gap and understand projects more intimately.

Learn how Sensat supported National Grid to access a digital twin of their substation. 

How leading energy provider decides and presents the best options for electricity transmission

We are excited to introduce the state-of-the-art 

 to our industry-leading data capture fleet. We are the first in the UK to invest and possess this LiDAR mapping unit in a bid to translate the world into a digital version. At Sensat, we have always been proud to invest in the most advanced equipment to create accurate representations of civil infrastructure project sites. Today, our accurate and detailed ‘digital twins’ of the world are supporting decision-making by improving teams understanding of their environments.

Highly accurate survey data for your civil infrastructure project

Today teams are using survey data to understand designs and plans in the context of the real world. Using a base layer of reality, teams are overlaying the project data they already have to better understand their project. You and your teams can inspect an advanced digital twin of your site using 

Sensat’s Common Visuslaisation Environment 

(CVE), and using the Leica TRK 700 you can view your base map data with an 11 mm absolute accuracy, straight out of the box. This means engineering-grade measurements between models and the real world can be taken from any device, from anywhere. Putting an accurate view of the real world alongside your technical data means that you can spot constraints and resolve them before more concrete plans have taken place and set back your works plan. The mobile mapping unit will enable teams to better interrogate the data they already have so that rework can be prevented.

Using this level of accuracy teams are using their digital twin to reduce boots on the ground as they can see an accurate representation of their site. For example, using the Leica TRK 700, instead of putting workers on the ground for repeated nights to survey a highway, the Leica TRK 700 mobile mapping unit can be driven without restriction, in one shift,  to create a faster, safer and more accurate survey. This can be captured and processed in hours and days from the safety of a vehicle. In comparison, traditional methods would entail road closures, disturbance to the network and boots on the ground which can be slow, and posses both risk to life as well as a massive impact on project budgets. Using this piece of equipment teams can quickly access data with record-level accuracies without the time, risk or cost associated with traditional surveys.

Why your civil infrastructure project needs Leica TRK 700 data

This advanced LiDAR kit allows you to access engineering-grade accuracy laser scans along with super-high resolution images. Here are 6 reasons your civil infrastructure project needs Leica TRK 700 data:

11mm absolute accuracy without additional ground control, paired with 48mp inspection cameras so you can view an accurate representation of your project.

With the integration of a brand new AI algorithm, the Leica TRK can blur all vehicles and people onboard before human interaction which ensures that this system is fully GDPR compliant as soon as the image is taken.

All information is encrypted and won’t leave the Pegasus TRK system, ensuring your data is safe from the get-go.

A SmartFusion ‘butterfly’ camera system with up to 120MP integral view. Boosted with add-on front, side and rear pavement cameras, the additional cameras multiply the resolution, creating data-rich imagery.

Enhanced calibration delivers true colour imagery according to the CIEDE2000 colour-difference formula so that your scans can be visualised with best-in-class colour truth to bring your site to life as it is in reality.

6. Location accuracy down to the centimetre

The sophisticated integration of IMU and SLAM technology in Pegasus TRK’s sensor architecture enables georeferencing in challenging GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System) denied environments. Precision RTK positioning gives location accuracy down to the centimetre, in real-time. The trajectory is improved when optical DMI accessories are installed on the back of the vehicle to measure the travel distance in GNSS challenging conditions accurately, avoiding the traditional slip error of wheel-based DMI.


Looking forward, Sensat’s aim for the Leica TRK 700 is to have it nearly constantly running as we digitise the UK.

If you are interested in learning more about our data capture service to support your next civil infrastructure project, get in touch below.

6 reasons your civil infrastructure project needs Leica TRK 700 data

In 2017 from a kitchen in Islington we founded Sensat. And like many founders, we had big ideas for what was then a passion project. Five years on we are proud to announce that 

Sensat has raised $20.5M (£16.7m) Series B

, one of the largest investor-owned energy companies in the world.

The funds will help us scale our sales and engineering functions and help drive digital automation in infrastructure projects in energy, rail and telecommunications. Sectors which have traditionally lacked the productivity gains that have been a by-product of the rapid digital adoption that has occurred in other sectors.

Sensat helps Infrastructure owners and their construction partners to deliver Infrastructure programmes on time and on budget by uncovering hidden risks. Our software powers teams to manage and visualise live construction information so they can plan, coordinate and track project performance for better, faster, more data-driven decisions.

This is a story of adventure, curiosity and exploration - as much as it is about technology. But it doesn’t start in the campuses of Silicon Valley as you may expect, it begins in a leafy borough of north London in 2017, where we were working late nights from a kitchen that doubled up as a bedroom…

Sensat has shifted and evolved during our 5 years and don’t get us wrong, we have made mistakes and learnt along the way. However, our intentions have remained tied to making the world a more sustainable place.

Sensat’s mission is to automate the way civil infrastructure is planned, built and managed with the aim of reducing costs by 5x, opening access to fundamental infrastructure to billions more people and ending devastating environmental practices.


Our idea (a platform that transformed large datasets into representations of the physical world) put the real world into a computer's language for the first time ever. Soon after, the project was named Sensat. Over the next few months, Sensat caught the attention of not only the academic community but London’s tech investors as well. In May 2017 we gained our first investment of £300,000 which we used to hire a small team and made the upgrade from an Islington kitchen to our first office—a 6-person suite at Moor Place, London.

Once we found our feet and began securing customers, Sensat outgrew the old space and moved to a 100-person office in Old Street, London. There we celebrated our Series A funding of $10M in 2019, our first $1M deal as well as 200% team growth during the pandemic. All of which have been celebrated with legendary Sensat parties (and the odd bout of sing-a-long karaoke) which carried us into the early hours of the morning.

The relentless search for better answers continues to be at the core of everything we do. Today over $150bn of Infrastructure is planned, built and managed through Sensat around the world. As the bedrock of society, we want a greater proportion of the global population to have access to fundamental Infrastructure (without wrecking our planet in the process). Although we’ve grown, our passion for building technology has stayed with us from the bedroom in Islington right to this very day.

The term startup is almost synonymous with growth. Growth metrics of sales, revenue, and quite frankly anything else that demonstrates a solid upward trend to share with the world. However, the one thing we have been very mindful of is our team growth and how we go about it. We knew from day one that our people were the foundation of Sensat, and they needed care, time and resources.

We figured out pretty fast that values are way more important than culture. There is this illusion that “startup culture” is all beers, pizza and table tennis, but it’s the winning together and “us against the world” mentality that keeps everyone motivated to work with each other every day. When you can win together working from home in a pandemic, you know you’re onto a good thing. If anything, the pandemic fired us up more!

As we have grown, especially over the past few years, we couldn’t not mention the dreaded C word… covid. When news first broke and our teams had to leave our 160 Old Street office we had recently moved into, we were adamant that we did not want this to affect our momentum or growth. We had planned to double our team by the end of 2021 and planned to stick to this.

While we believe in growth, we also believe it should never be at the expense of our team’s values. Our team, and the relationships within them, are the foundation of Sensat. We work together and win as a team. Subsequently, we have always been very attentive when hiring. We can say hand-on-heart that 95% of the time one of us will be a part of the interview process. We have found this so important. Not only do potential candidates get time with us to buy into our mission but also to check cultural fit within the organisation. We look for team players who are not afraid to go against the status quo.

Through the pandemic, as we all worked and onboarded team members remotely, we had to find a way to stay tight-knit, despite growing hard and fast. We arranged virtual coffee mornings, quizzes and drinks which helped to keep the team feeling alive. And it seemed to have worked, despite our nearly 100-person-sized operation we maintain a small team mentality. Why is this so important? It means that communication and willingness to help each other are baked into our values.  ‘Winning Together’ means the team can support each other, brainstorm ideas and bring their whole selves to work.

Our team are experienced operators who have built, led, contributed to and learnt from some of the most well-known scaling success stories in global tech. Our management team has led multi-billion dollar exits in the construction/tech sectors at companies such as Google, Amazon, Oracle, McKinsey, Microsoft and Palantir. We're aligned by purpose, equipped with transparency and enabled by agency.

Today it is clear that individuals who come to work at Sensat are not just looking for ‘a job’, but looking for a purposeful place to spend their time. Our culture is bound by people on a mission to make the world more sustainable.

Following the pandemic when Sensat was forced to adopt a hybrid work approach, it made us reassess how we approached the norm of a 9-5. As the office reopened and we adopted a more hybrid approach, we realised that our team knew how they worked best, and we trusted that. Some would come into the office every day, others would be in for just collaborative sessions and face-to-face client meetings. Every day we could see our people naturally adapting the way they worked to suit how they can best create value.

For our people, purpose and meaning matter, so we wanted to redesign the way we build and operate Sensat to best support them, so that we could succeed together. We no longer believed that time spent equals value created. Rather, creating the right conditions for people’s success leads to our ability to outcompete, which equals outsized value created (by every measure). To be intentional about this, we moved to a 4 day week, redesigned our office and kept a flexible hybrid structure. These compounding effects of wellbeing, inspiration and reflection, combined with clearer prioritisation are creating a virtuous cycle that is setting Sensat apart, generating significant momentum and helping us to achieve our ambitious mission.

Sensat’s scaling and growth has been quite a mission. And do not get me wrong we have not always got it right-first-time. Here are our top 3 lessons we learnt the hard way through scaling:

We ruffled a few feathers… and perhaps not in the best way

When we first started it was an uphill battle to try and win customer confidence back in 2017, especially when you’re the new kid on the block in an industry such as Construction. I think it’s ok to admit at this stage that we probably got our value proposition wrong at the beginning. We may have ruffled a few feathers trying to convince a “laggard” industry that we knew what was best for them and I think some in the industry still remember this side of us. Finding visionaries to risk their reputation was a big ask of them but I think it’s paid off for those who did. We wouldn’t be where we are today without our early customers and the invaluable feedback loop we have with them.

A startup always has the odds stacked against it – grit is not a key trait, it’s essential. One of the largest challenges we had overcome is one I think is rarely discussed but super common in Europe; building products with non-technical co-founders. We spent over two years incorrectly building (research, product, engineering) because we didn’t really know how, and in the end, we threw everything out and started again. Sure it cost us a few million pounds (expensive school!) but we learnt so much about not only our customers but how not to build a product, which means we’re now much better equipped. Failing dramatically and learning quickly from it only made us stronger as we now knew what not to do and we carry these lessons with us every day.

We have two ears and one mouth for a reason

Although you may approach an industry with a set idea, you shouldn’t be afraid to pivot and shift once you get to know your customer better. Listen to your potential customers, they will be the ones who are best able to share their problems. In our case, we cannot just show potential customers all the amazing things Sensat can offer, but we have to educate an industry that there are improved efficiencies to be gained through technologies like our own. When you educate and people connect the dots themselves, they discover their issue has a solution, and you are there to swoop them up when they are ready.

 which has quickly become our key revenue stream.

We have introduced some ground-breaking new features including CCTV feeding live information into the platform, 

, going hybrid and empowered our people with autonomy.

 with National Grid Partners, one of the largest investor-owned energy companies in the world.

We have moved out of our 160 office into a space which has been reimagined to fit the way our people work with more collaboration spaces

Our employee engagement has never been so high with an eNPS (Employee Net Promotor Score: how likely our employees are to recommend Sensat as a place to work) at 62 (anything over 50 is considered ‘excellent’ and the tech sector average is 26

The one thing that you can be sure of in a start-up is change. We learn and grow from our customers, what is going well and what changes need to be made. Today more than $150bn worth of Infrastructure is planned, built and managed through Sensat worldwide. The investment from National Grid, one of the world’s largest publicly listed utilities, adds significant credibility to the future of our technology and the prominent role it will play to safely and sustainably transition critical energy Infrastructure to support renewables. There is currently a once-in-a-generation shift away from centralised power generation towards more distributed renewable power. Sensat’s technology has a crucial role to play in Net Zero objectives.

National Grid will also facilitate the launch of Sensat into the US market, where the vision is to eliminate fossil fuels from the US gas and electric systems.

“The backing of National Grid brings additional credibility for the business to both customers and industry players. We welcome their participation in helping us expand into the US and beyond to help Sensat underpin Infrastructure automation at such a pivotal point in world history. Their investment will help make renewables ambitions a reality, powered by our technology to enable the modern societies of tomorrow to take shape.”—Sensat CEO James Dean

Our journey to Series B

The team have been working on some exciting new updates last quarter. Hear from Product Manager, Aifric, who gives a roundup of our customers' favourite Sensat releases.

At Sensat we are all about getting more from the data you already possess to help teams make better decisions. So, during the past quarter, we looked into new ways to enhance interactions with your data.

Walk around your site as if you were there

Our new 'look around' camera mode allows you to explore your project from a first-person perspective. Using this option you can walk around your site as if you were there in real life. Teams are finding this new camera mode particularly useful for viewing terrestrial captured data up close, and for navigating around indoor or enclosed spaces. For example, an engineer could remotely  ‘walk through’ a tunnel and look up and all around them, inspecting every aspect of the tunnel as if they were there in person. Using this mode to survey, engineers can identify signs of wear and tear such as cracking or water ingress, all while taking boots off the ground and keeping personnel away from danger.

Right-click to reveal the layers you are looking at

You can now quickly identify exactly what files you are looking at using a single right-click on your mouse. We understood that when multiple layers are turned on it is not always clear as to which files are showing. Now using your right-click you are able to seamlessly interrogate your project to reveal what is showing under your cursor. 

Take accurate measurements between your designs and models and the real world

Previously you could only take measurements or markup your survey data. Using this update you can now take accurate measurements between your survey data and your georeferenced design files (e.g. BIM models) or measure and markup the design files themselves. This is helping teams to better explore how models and designs would interact with the environment, plan around the asset and spot potential constraints before they impact the schedule of works. And, for teams using specialist software with expensive licences for their design work, this feature is helping to democratise data so that more users can unlock learnings from it.

 to Primavera P6 Schedule Integration. Now you can visualise the schedule on a Gantt chart, link the activities to models to set their schedule dates, and step through the sequence manually or via ‘smart jump’ arrow buttons.

This is allowing project managers to visualise their programmes of work within the context of an up-to-date digital twin of their site—facilitating stakeholder communications and 4D planning activities. Having all of this information in one place makes it easier to present the construction schedule and gives team members an easy-to-understand visual format of plans to aid execution and streamline issue identification & resolution. 

News: Blog

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Our journey to Series B

Top 3 feature releases from Q3

It’s here: Integrate your schedule of works with Sensat

Newbie to expert: Getting started with Sensat

Interface management is costing you millions, here's what to do about it

Increasing the safety and quality of site visits

How to eliminate design clashes

The importance of precise measurements

See project and site constraints sooner during constraint planning

The complete guide to the Common Visualisation Environment (CVE)

The best decisions are made together