As Â鶹´«Ă˝Ół» plans for more than $100 billion in major infrastructure projects — many involving extensive underground work — a B.C.-based startup has technology aimed at helping owners and contractors reduce below‑grade delays and cost overruns on high-risk, high-budget projects.
Shelby Yee, CEO of GroundedAI, says its technology captures data and provides a 3D picture connecting field teams underground and decision makers above on a daily basis – an important factor in mining and tunnelling operations, for example, where soil conditions can change unexpectedly, causing Â鶹´«Ă˝Ół»/excavation delays. In addition to gathering underground data quickly, the technology collects information to provide insights on a project’s evolution, says Yee, a geo-engineer with 10 years of experience in underground data capture.
Recently the startup received a $2M injection from a number of investors led by Stand Up Ventures. The company will use the capital to accelerate its market entry into the tunneling sector.
She says an example of where GroundedAI’s technology might be useful is on transit tunnelling such as the Ontario Line in Toronto. The 15.6-kilometre project’s original budget estimated at just under $11 billion in 2019 has ballooned to about $34 billion.
Below grade is “full of surprises” and it is difficult to probe underground for more than “some samplings” prior to excavation in a dense urban environment, Yee points out, adding that there are still projects relying on old-school paper logs, spreadsheets and disconnected tools for tunnelling.
“As you go into Â鶹´«Ă˝Ół» you may only have a linear line of what you think is going to happen in the next hundred metres but the reality is the ground is much more variable than a perfect linear line.”
Yee says the digital information technology provides progress reports and shares data on what the ground conditions are versus what they were supposed to be.
By providing “a definitive 3D picture of what happened at a specific time” owners and contractors can resolve disputes before they escalate. She says along with being used for geotechnical or geological decisions, GroundedAI’s equipment can examine the supply chain and what ground support is being input.
 “We are bringing proof of record of the underground not only for technical decisions but also for commercial decisions.”
The company’s core platform consists of Lithos, an iPad-based LiDAR application for underground data capture, and Strata, a web platform for geo-referencing, mapping, and identifying variances from project budgets and ground models.
Yee says the company has experience in a variety of infrastructure tunnels in Â鶹´«Ă˝Ół», the U.S. and overseas, working as a consultant to such engineering firms as Hatch and Schnabel Engineering.  She says cost overruns have been trending up and points to research by Bent Flyvbjerg, a Danish economic professor and world leading scholar on megaprojects, showing the average cost overrun on rail and urban transit projects is 45 percent.
GroundedAI company still has work yet to do to meet its goals, Yee says. Providing an app that collects data and a platform that looks at schedules is only half battle. Another challenge is supporting Â鶹´«Ă˝Ół» management teams day-to-day, month-to-month and across the span of a project’s life.
Yee says interest from the tunnelling industry in the company’s technology has been “quite phenomenal.”
“It really shows that there are not only opportunities to improve costs but that there are teams working underground that want to adopt technology.”
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