BENTLEY Systems, Inc. announced over the weekend, its acquisition of Cesium, a pioneering 3D geospatial technology company.
This strategic acquisition strengthens Bentley’s position in the digital twin space, combining Cesium’s robust geospatial capabilities with Bentley’s iTwin platform to offer a comprehensive solution for managing both built and natural environments.
Cesium is renowned for its contributions to the 3D geospatial industry, particularly its development of the open standard 3D Tiles, which has been adopted globally by governments, enterprises, and a large developer community. The company’s SaaS platform, Ce-sium ion, delivers 3D geospatial experiences to over 1 million devices monthly, while its open-source software has been downloaded more than 10 million times.
The adoption of Cesium’s technologies spans across industries, enabling the creation of powerful 3D geospatial applications that range from urban planning and defense to construction and environmental monitoring. An important element of Cesium’s success is its commitment to open standards and interoperability, which aligns with Bentley’s vision of an open ecosystem for digital twins.
Bentley’s iTwin platform, which is widely used by engineering and construction firms for managing infrastructure projects, integrates real-time data from engineering, IoT, reality, and subsurface sources to create digital twins. These digital twins provide a dynamic, da-ta-rich virtual representation of physical assets. By combining Cesium’s geospatial capabilities with iTwin’s data integration, users can now visualize infrastructure in 3D across vast geographic areas or zoom in to millimeter-precise details.
Bentley CEO Nicholas Cumins emphasized the significance of this acquisition, stating, “A 3D geospatial view is the most intuitive way for owner-operators and engineering services providers to search for, query, and visualize information about infrastructure networks and assets. With the combined capabilities of Cesium and iTwin, infrastructure professionals can make better informed decisions in full 3D geospatial context–all within a single, highly performant environment.”
Cesium’s technology is already integrated into global projects, such as Komatsu’s Smart Construction platform. Komatsu, a major con-struction equipment manufacturer, uses Cesium’s 3D geospatial tools to monitor construction sites, track progress, and make real-time measurements. With the acquisition, Komatsu will benefit from enhanced access to Bentley’s digital twin capabilities, enabling more efficient and precise construction management.
“Komatsu and Cesium brought novel thinking to the construction industry by leveraging advanced visualizations to deliver more pre-cise insights and enable our customers to make better, more informed construction decisions. With Cesium as part of Bentley, we can further enrich our Smart Construction digital twins with engineering models, subsurface data, and more, for safer and more efficient construction projects,” Chikashi Shike, executive officer of Komatsu’s Smart Construction Promotion Division, commented,
Cesium has played a key role in advocating for open standards in the geospatial industry, most notably through the development of 3D Tiles. In 2019, the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) adopted 3D Tiles as a community standard, further solidifying Cesium’s role in advancing the interoperability of 3D geospatial data.
“As infrastructure sectors become more data-centric, the importance of an open ecosystem will only increase. As the leading voice for open standards and interoperability in the geospatial community, OGC welcomes the ongoing commitment of Bentley and Cesium to solve global challenges through open, interoperable platforms,” Peter Rabley, CEO of OGC said, praising the acquisition.
“Joining Bentley marks an important milestone for Cesium as we continue our journey to create the best developer platform for the built and natural environment–founded on open standards and open-source technologies. The combined power of our two organi-zations and our shared commitment to openness will provide new opportunities for growth and create greater value for an already flourishing developer ecosystem that ranges from small start-ups to global enterprises,” Patrick Cozzi, Cesium’s CEO expressed.
As part of the acquisition, Cozzi will now serve as Bentley’s chief platform officer, overseeing the integration of Cesium’s capabilities into Bentley’s iTwin platform and reporting to the company’s CTO, Julien Moutte.
While financial details of the transaction were not disclosed, the acquisition is expected to expand the capabilities of both companies, offering developers, infrastructure professionals, and enterprises an unparalleled platform for creating and managing digital twins at scale. Dechert LLP acted as the legal advisor to Bentley for this acquisition.
In addition to its collaboration with Komatsu, Cesium has been involved in major projects such as NASA’s Mars exploration, real-time monitoring of smart cities, and defense applications. The company’s 3D Tiles technology is critical for managing massive datasets in applications like urban simulations and large-scale geographic visualizations.
