Recently, Mach9 made a splash in industry press with the release of Digital Surveyor 2. This is a platform that addresses a real and growing problem for survey and engineering teams working with lidar, and it deserves a closer look than a product announcement typically gets. Mach9 is seeking to address one of the biggest bottlenecks in the industry, moving from a scanned point cloud to useful CAD data.
According to Mach9, the new platform is a web-based CAD environment designed specifically for survey and engineering teams working with lidar point clouds. Its core capability is an AI-powered extraction engine that suggests linear features, including curbs, pavement edges, guardrails, and barriers, directly from scan data in real time. Every suggestion stays fully editable, and the system adapts to each user's drawing patterns as they work.
The company argues the business case is straightforward. In telecom, transportation, and utilities, lidar is being used on more projects than ever, but production teams haven't grown at the same pace. Skilled technicians still spend significant time on repetitive digitization rather than the higher-value interpretation work they were trained to do. Mach9 is positioning Digital Surveyor 2 as a direct answer to that bottleneck, with early users reporting project completion times up to 100 times faster than traditional workflows.
Per Mach9, early users are already seeing results in practice. Juliana Conlon, a GIS Engineering Technician at TrueNet Communications, described tasks that previously took a month being completed in a matter of days. Matthew Skibba, Director of Reality Capture at Feldman Geospatial, pointed to the platform's ability to let teams verify extractions in 3D quickly and efficiently. Russell Hall, a Senior Survey Project Manager at Langan, noted that someone who understands where points belong in the field can be productive almost immediately, without needing deep CAD experience.
The feature set, including advanced draping, improved corner snapping, and integrated quality assurance at every step, reflects direct feedback from production teams according to the company, and it shows in how the platform handles real-world workflows.
As for what’s next, Mach9 has been explicit that Digital Surveyor 2 is a foundation rather than a finished product, with expansion of automation capabilities and supported feature types planned in the coming months, shaped by ongoing feedback from teams using the product in the field.
