Matterport CEO RJ Pittman joins Yahoo Finance Live to discuss digitizing 3D spaces, partnering with Meta and Amazon, and future applications of the company's service.

Video Transcript

- Thanks, Brad. As we continue to track moves into the metaverse, Matterport, the company that makes digital twins of properties from homes to stores and other businesses, reported fourth quarter and full-year results yesterday. Total subscribers crossed the half million mark at the end of last year, and annualized recurring revenue grew to $66 million.

For more on these results and the business outlook, we have Matterport CEO RJ Pittman here with us now. RJ, thanks for joining us again this afternoon. Given the stock move that we're seeing this afternoon for Matterport, what do you think investors are reacting to from these results?

RJ PITTMAN: Well, first of all, I think we've entered 2022 with a very turbulent stock market that all companies are enduring, as you guys were just discussing earlier. For Matterport, this was a record year for Matterport-- a record year for the company on revenue, subscribers, and sum. And Q4 was very strong. And as you can see, we beat consensus on the top line. We met consensus on EPS. So we feel really great about the quarter.

But I can't help but ignore some of these macro effects that are weighing down the entire tech sector. And I think we all want to see more growth tech stocks, like Matterport. And it's definitely coming for us in 2002. We're very early into the quarter here and into the start of the year, but we're feeling great about it.

- And [INAUDIBLE] where are you [INAUDIBLE].

RJ PITTMAN: I'm sorry could you repeat that? There was a little bit of breakup on the communication.

- Hi, RJ.

- Sure, absolutely.

- This is [INAUDIBLE]. I'm going to hop in here. I just wanted to take a look at your venture into the metaverse. Where do you see your company positioning itself as you see an increasing number of companies also coming into this space but a lot of people still wondering how much potential it actually holds?

RJ PITTMAN: Right. The way that we think about the digital universe is the same way we thought about it 10 years ago when Matterport was started. We turn physical spaces-- buildings, cruise ships, commercial airlines, you name it. If it is a physical space or vessel, we have likely digitized and created a dimensionally accurate digital twin, which has proven over the years to have durable commercial value for our customers now in 177 countries. Right.

And as the world starts to shift and as technology platform companies move towards a digital first world, whether that's for meetings or entertainment, productivity, even maybe manufacturing and manufacturing simulations in a digital 3D-simulated environment, we may call it the metaverse, Matterport is in fantastic position because this is the business we've been about since the very beginning. And what it's perhaps doing is helping broader industries think about how to embrace the digital realm as a way to run their organizations and certainly run their facilities more efficiently.

And we think, with that, we've got great examples. Amazon has come into the space and introduced a service in partnership with Matterport called their IoT Twin-maker. And it is Matterport's digital twins that are really unlocking the potential of AWS customers who are managing facilities at scale do it in a 3D environment.

Same thing with our partnership with Meta, where here we're trying to basically connect the dots and tap into our spatial data library. It's the largest library of buildings and spaces that is a dimensionally accurate digital twin in the world. And these have great implications for any of these new environments. Our engine and our pipeline for creating spatial data fits in perfectly.

- And as you mentioned your collaboration with Meta, the AI research last year to train to help train AI models, what is the monetization opportunity there?

RJ PITTMAN: I look at it this way. To build the next big platform in technology, which is certainly what Matterport is off and running to do, we have to look a little bit further into the future. And this collection of researchers and academics from literally the top universities in the world have taken hold of Matterport's unique 3D spatial data.

We have over 450 applications to get access to our 1,000 buildings and spaces that we have opened up to this community. And there are already hundreds of universities at work. And what are they doing? They're building intelligent systems that can function. So think of robots and even personal digital assistants that can operate autonomously inside any kind of space-- a building, a hotel, a home, or restaurant-- leading to the future of technology and leading to the big changes in the way that we interact with the physical world and how we might even be using robots and intelligent agents to help us along the way.

And those research outputs will turn into applications that we can easily make available in the Matterport marketplace, which is our commercial ecosystem where you can customize your digital twin, your virtual tours, whatever your property might be, using some of the most advanced technology that's going to be coming out of this research effort in partnership with Meta and all of these universities around the world. It's really quite exciting.

- Now obviously you have the collaborative aspect, but then you also have perhaps the potential for mergers and acquisitions. In terms of that strategy, then, Matterport closed its deal to acquire Enview in January. How do you see that progressing? And are there any other sort of M&A opportunities that you see out there?

RJ PITTMAN: Yes. Enview is a very strategic addition to Matterport strategy. And this is what we call datafication. And that is, what do you do with all of this spatial data once you have it? Our customers, whether it is a large global retailer with thousands of locations or it happens to be a commercial real estate customer that has thousands of office buildings, they want to understand what's going on inside those spaces, and they want to do it at scale.

And so think of-- Enview's technology is able to go in and analyze a hundred, a thousand, even a million buildings in a matter of minutes and basically do an automated AI-powered building inspection. And you can program it to look for very specific things, right down to determining if a sprinkler head in a construction project is out of place and if it's out of place even by a few centimeters. And to be able to do that in software is extraordinary.

And to think about the job that you would have to do across, let's say, a thousand locations for a large retailer, that's like finding a needle in a haystack. But with Enview and Matterport and what we call datafication, that becomes easy like a Google search. And this is really important to the future of how we manage our buildings and think about facilities in the next decade ahead, but it's also something that can unlock really creative ideas right in your own living room, like unlocking the ability to virtually redesign your living room, lay out new furniture, even change the color of the paint on the walls in a point-and-click fashion. And this is where we're going to extend the value proposition of Matterport once you capture that digital twin.

- Certainly endless possibilities there. Thank you for sharing your insights. RJ Pittman there, Matterport CEO. Thank you for your time.