Bentley Buys Cesium, Geospatial Information and Digital Twin Platform

Bentley Systems acquired geospatial information platform Cesium, a platform for creating 3D geospatial applications. Terms of the Sept. 6 transaction were not disclosed, but it is expected to close by the end of 2024.

Cesium’s 3D Tiles standard has been adopted by Google Earth as the mapping platform’s 3D scenes provider through its Map Tiles application program interface. Photorealistic 3D Tiles are a 3D mesh textured with high-resolution images that create a scene from user data. Cesium has an open application program interface that allows it to use several different types of data, whether image files, GIS information or satellite imagery. Bentley has been touting an open data approach to design using its tools since the introduction of its iTwin platform for digital twins in 2015. Acquiring Cesium brings a geospatial platform and the data held within it to iTwin. 

“We’ve made quite a few acquisitions to broaden our portfolio and to increase the depth in a lot of our tools in different spaces, including GIS,” said Julien Moutte, chief technology officer at Bentley Systems. “Here, we have a special opportunity. We have been big believers from the beginning that we need to bring that portfolio together through a platform play.”

Since technology vendors started storing customers’ project data on cloud-based platforms in the late 2000s, they have had to tackle the problem that data needs to be structured differently and made to be shareable for lightweight transmission.
That has meant more open application program interfaces (API) such as Cesium’s Map Tiles and more partnerships and acquisitions between companies with building information modeling authoring tools and GIS data, two fields that were once separated fairly firmly between professionals in architecture and engineering and planning, respectively. 

“CesiumJS, and 3D Tile is this open standard for streaming massive models and that’s not just terrain models, that’s also infrastructure models,” said Patrick Cozzi, CEO of Cesium, who will join Bentley as an executive in the deal. “We’ve been guided by being open, by contributing and engaging authentically in the community.”

Data is available for over 2,500 cities and 49 countries in an open ecosystem of 3D Tiles-enabled runtimes on Cesium’s servers, including CesiumJS, Unreal, Unity and NVIDIA Omniverse. One customer is equipment manufacturer Komatsu that uses Cesium to monitor construction sites using its equipment. 

Moutte characterized the Cesium acquisition as “doubling down” on open standards for data in infrastructure design and construction. 

“Just having an API where you can query your data but you can never access it is very limiting in a sense,” he said. “We believe that we have to win the trust of our users, through the features and the value we deliver to them, not by locking them in, by not letting them access that data. One of the key pillars of openness is not only open source and open standards, but also open access to APIs.”

ENR Associate Technology, Equipment and Products Editor Jeff Yoders has been writing about design and construction innovations for 20 years. He is a five-time Jesse H. Neal award winner and multiple ASBPE winner for his tech coverage. Jeff previously wrote about construction technology for Structural Engineer, CE News and Building Design + Construction. He also wrote about materials prices, construction procurement and estimation for MetalMiner.com. He lives in Chicago, the birthplace of the skyscraper, where the pace of innovation never leaves him without a story to chase.