#27 – Nate Dang and Kevin Grover

January 27th, 2026

#27 – Nate Dang and Kevin Grover

Angus Stocking (00:04.846)
This is Everything Is Somewhere. I’m Angus Stocking. Looq.ai is a geospatial technology company founded in 2021 with a vision of integrating camera and software designed to meet challenges to global infrastructure with foundational technological innovation. My guests today are Kevin Grover, Head of Customer Success at Looq.ai, and Nate Dang of Accurate Surveying & Mapping, whose company recently won a major award in innovation from Looq.ai. Gentlemen, thank you for being with me today. I’ve been looking forward to this. So welcome to Everything Is Somewhere.

Kevin Grover (00:46)
Thanks for having us, Angus.

Nate Dang (00:48)
Thanks, Angus.

Angus Stocking (00:50)
And Kevin, maybe we could start off. That was kind of a minimal introduction to what you do. I know that Looq.ai is innovating rapidly, doing amazing things in this space. Can you tell us more about the firm and what you offer? And my audience is primarily land surveyors, geospatial experts. How do your innovations make life better for my audience?

Kevin Grover (01:21.484)
Yeah, absolutely great, happy to answer that. My background is actually as a land surveyor. So I was in a different place when I joined Looq here in May this year. I was actually working on the consulting side using eight Looq devices in my past company, so I’ve been very exposed to the technology. As far as the land surveying industry, we definitely fit into the tool set or the toolbox for the surveying industry.

Looq offers a very low‑cost, handheld, easy‑to‑use reality capture platform that’s a little bit different than the majority of systems on the market. Our biggest difference is the fact that we are imagery‑only. We do tend to get compared a lot with lidar‑based technologies, but we do not use lidar on our platform. We are integrated with the GNSS processing and our photogrammetric engine, which makes us very different than others.

The device is called our QCAM. It’s about a three‑pound handheld reality‑capture platform that can collect data as you’re walking. So the goal for us is to have a very low‑cost, easy‑to‑use handheld system bundled with our cloud processing, which allows us to generate the fastest, most precise geospatial data that we think is possible. We’re always looking to speed that up and do more with our technology, but we’re definitely kind of doing something different than a lot of other solutions that exist in the market.

Nate Dang (03:02.392)
We’ve been working with Looq for a while now, since we hooked up with Dom and his crew maybe a year and a half ago at a conference, and we’d used the product on a lot of little jobs. I got wind of the contest that was happening and was kind of searching for something that would be of interest to Looq and to help promote their product, because I really like it.

We had a client come along who acquired an old opera house in the little town of Soldier, which is just outside of Fairfield, Idaho. And when I took a look at the site, it seemed like it was conducive to kind of what we wanted to do with the Looq.

Angus Stocking
Just to drill down, why was that? What would you normally have done?

Nate Dang (03:40)
Looq is really, really good at facades of buildings. So I thought immediately this would be a good case study for it. At the same time, I had a feeling that we could use the Looq along with our aerial mapping and GNSS and complete the project without a total station, which I thought was kind of fun. You know, we’ve been testing the Looq and we know its capabilities and how to run it to get the precise measurements that we want and to understand its accuracy. My idea was to forego a traditional method of capturing, you know, so to speak, and kind of combine these other elements and see how it fit with the Looq.

Angus Stocking (04:40.514)
Sounds great. So let me ask some dumb questions because I don’t know much about your workflow. What equipment and software do you actually bring out into the field with you?

Nate Dang (05:16.526)
In the field we use a JAVAD GNSS to get our locations vertically and horizontally on the earth. And then we used one of our smaller drones to do the aerial mapping. I forget its model number, I should probably know that. But we brought out one of our little UAVs that we use on small sites. This thing was kind of less than half an inch… little guy.

Angus Stocking
Okay. So Kevin, what solutions are loaded into this GNSS and drone combination? What’s actually happening behind the scenes with your innovations?

Kevin Grover (06:00)
Yeah, definitely. To kind of add to that, we do very similar data processing to what a drone does. A drone, especially the smaller systems that Nate’s talking about, is imagery‑based. They’ve got a camera sensor that can capture images as you’re flying from a small drone to give you that pie‑in‑the‑sky aerial view. On our side, we only process the data that’s collected from our Looq device specifically. The concept is the same, that we take a number of overlapping images.

Our QCAM camera actually has four cameras built into the device, so it really works like a ground‑based drone. You walk back and forth, you capture as much area as you can just by walking your project site, and we take care of the rest. We’re capturing a lot of high‑resolution images as you’re walking.

Kevin Grover (07:01.986)
We do have the integrated GNSS antenna in our QCAM device, which is where the integration with tools that Nate mentions from Javad or Trimble or Topcon comes in. We can take that raw GPS data and get more accurate positional data by post‑processing the GPS data. So we use a combination of all these sensors. We use the GPS from our QCAM that’s corrected from Nate’s technology.

We take the imagery on our side, we’ve got other sensors on board, and we merge that into the most realistic, accurate, three‑dimensional data product that we can generate purely just from imagery and walking around a project site.

Angus Stocking
Okay, so Nate, the Looq camera or camera set was not drone‑mounted. That was something you were walking around with?

Nate Dang
Okay, handheld.

Angus Stocking
Handheld or on a rod, or what’s the physical appearance?

Nate Dang (08:09.174)
It’s a cool little handheld machine with four cameras on it. It’s a tiny little guy. Once you’ve got your control set up with your control, you basically wander around and it looks at your control.

Angus Stocking
It’s self‑registering as it…

Nate Dang
Yeah, you basically walk a circle around your control points. So we set several control points with the Javad GPS. And once we were satisfied with those points, we registered with the camera. We actually walk in a circle around it a couple of times. I like to go two different directions because I find the more information I give to the Looq guys, the better product I get in the end.

I kind of overdo everything from what they spec and tell us, and I’ve found that when I do that, I get really, really good results and it doesn’t really take that much longer. So I’m sorry, I’m probably off track at this point.

Angus Stocking (09:10)
No, you’re great. For listeners, Kevin held up the Looq device. It looks a little bit like a half‑scale, old‑fashioned diver’s helmet, I would say. Compact, looks kind of fun to work with. And not very heavy, I’m assuming.

Kevin Grover (09:32.45)
Nope, the device is actually quite lightweight and portable. It only weighs three pounds. So it’s a very easy‑to‑use handheld device that you can carry around for a while, and it’s a lot smaller than a lot of the other systems that are on the market. That’s one of the best features that we’ve got: the portability and ease of use are two of the biggest form‑factor things that we have. Even the case that it comes in is small. You can throw it in a backpack. It’s not a very big device.

Angus Stocking
So Nate, it makes sense to me to walk clockwise and then counterclockwise and come from two directions. Is there any falloff in accuracy as you get to the second story since you’re shooting up, or do you worry about that at all?

Nate Dang
Yeah, you know, I think if I was really going to be critical on buildings, I would use a little extra care, especially going up and above. But at this point, when we’re combining between the Looq and our aerial mapping, when you’re starting to get those two different datasets together—and at some point we’ll be able to merge them. They’re not quite there yet, but at some point they’ll merge together. When that happens, that’s going to be really magic because the accuracy will really snap, you know?

So the way we use it is we have our dataset from Looq and we work on their platform to extract the information that we need. And then we work with the drone and we put both of those datasets into something called Virtual Surveyor. When we’re working within that platform, we can toggle back and forth and get the information that we need.

Angus Stocking (11:23.148)
Okay. And could the Looq device be plausibly mounted on an extensible pole or even drone‑mounted at some point in the future?

Nate Dang
I think definitely. Yeah, I think absolutely. I think if it was critical to get the top of the building, we could run it up on a pole and scan up there as well. In this case, it wasn’t really… At this point, I’m really going above and beyond what my client wanted, but it was a case for me to further use the Looq and find out what it does. I like to go out and push its limits and see what it does and doesn’t do.

Angus Stocking
And Kevin, is a Looq device drone‑mounted in the near future, you think?

Kevin Grover
It’s one of the things that’s on our list. So definitely, as it stands right now, the version of hardware is basically working with an antenna on the top of it; this version is not physically able to be mounted on a drone. But as Nate mentioned, definitely this is where we’re heading as a company. We want to look at doing more of this lightweight, simple reality capture from a variety of different mechanisms. Not everything is walkable, not everything is flyable, not everything is drivable.

So our goal is really to kind of build the best‑in‑class solution that will be able to do drone‑mount, walking‑mount, scooter‑mount—which we can technically do now—and then, of course, vehicle‑mount where you could drive at highway speeds, collecting this data and processing it into survey‑quality data just from imagery.

Angus Stocking (13:04.908)
You know, it was a big innovation for me when I was working in the field as a land surveyor in Idaho, actually, to start working with the single‑mount GPS unit and to just be able to walk around and get coordinates without the hand signals to the total station man, and you could be out there alone. It was fun and seemed easy as long as everything went well. And this seems to kind of… ten times that amount of fun.

You can just walk around with a cute little Star Wars droid‑looking device and it’s gathering this wonderful data. Kudos to both of you for working on an interesting project. What kind of resolutions are we talking, and how does that compare to conventional photo‑capture scanning?

Kevin Grover
I can tackle that one. Honestly, the resolution that we’re able to derive from imagery is quite astounding. The benefit of imagery is that camera sensors are getting cheaper every day. Every new phone you purchase has a better camera in it. That just sets us up for a lot of things that we can do with the data significantly better than we ever used to. Camera technology is just inherently inexpensive compared to lidar data and other sensors in the market.

Kevin Grover (14:55.286)
We are basically able to generate… we can technically generate millimeter‑level point spacing of the data in theory, and that could just keep getting denser as you get more pixels in your imagery. It’s just an economy‑of‑scale thing. From a realistic side, one of the biggest challenges that we’ve always been facing in this industry, in the survey industry, as terrestrial lidar and aerial lidar and photogrammetry have been challenging our surveying profession for years, is that these data volumes went from here to exponentially larger, and that was just by implementing this new technology, which is great.

As you mentioned, it’s fun, it’s cool, it’s exciting, but it’s also caused a lot of problems: data‑management issues, extraction issues, really kind of solving that problem. At the end, if I only need a handful of points for some sort of engineering project or an architectural project or some sort of end product that I’m trying to derive, then scanning really is something that’s always been horribly complicating the field. Sure, the field capture is significantly faster, we get this really robust data, but we’re still left with gigabytes, terabytes of data that are really, really hard to use.

So one of our goals is: we’re trying to deliver data that is usable to more people, that’s not getting down to that millimeter deformation‑level data. That is not really our focus. We are focused on survey‑quality data. I like to say RTK‑quality data; that really hits a lot of projects that we’re able to do every day of the week that surveyors have.

Kevin Grover (17:17.76)
We’re not going after—I always talk to our sales team—we’re not going after super‑sexy projects in the survey world. We’re going after the bread‑and‑butter projects that every surveyor has every day of the week, that we’re trying to streamline and make just more efficient, bring faster ways to go to market with products, and just simplifying the entire experience. So that’s really what our focus is.

We can generate insanely high level of detail, but it’s really not in our model. We want actionable data that can provide insights to our customers like Nate and their customers. There are a lot of use cases for this data, but we’ve been pigeonholed in the past of just making data dumb. I hate to say it, we’ve been dumbing down this beautiful geospatial data to points, lines, and arcs for far too long. We need to add more intelligence to this data.

I think that’s the opportunity for the survey community and the survey profession moving forward: we need to move beyond what we’ve been doing in the past, and the market out there will deliver so much more. That’s my little soapbox rant as a surveyor now working for a software startup and everything in between. It’s an opportunity. I think a lot of surveyors have felt this as stepping on toes and, honestly, replacing what we do—like you mentioned, Angus—replacing things we’ve done for years in the field. But I think it’s complementary and I’m excited. It’s changing the surveying industry.

Angus Stocking
You mentioned the word intelligence and that lets me segue into a question I have. So AI is right in the name. How is Looq applying AI? Is that a buzzword or is there something actionable and machine learning that’s really helping things out here?

Kevin Grover
Absolutely. To be honest, it’s hard to get away from the AI term. It’s a horribly misused term in everything these days. Yes, it’s in our name and yes, we do a lot of it, but we also have goals to do a lot more. Currently, our biggest use case around it is a few things. We actually do a lot of data filtering and privacy filtering from the data that we capture. That’s always a challenge on a lot of datasets that you’re collecting now that are using imagery or lidar that’s collecting people and license plates and maybe sensitive content.

Kevin Grover (19:18.68)
So we actually use AI as one of the first things to do automatic people, vehicle, imagery blurring. That allows us not only to remove it from a privacy perspective, but we actually clean a dataset to remove moving objects. That’s one of the easiest, simplest use cases on our end, just being able to allow companies like Nate’s company to capture congested areas with people moving around on project sites, but you’re doing it from the comfort of being away from all of the congestion. We can do it along roadways. We’re automatically removing that from the data.

The second part of that is the intelligence of the data itself. We actually use AI to intelligently detect and isolate different assets and information from the data already. We automatically detect ground points. We automatically detect power poles, overhead power lines, fire hydrants, streetlights, signs—all of these objects that exist in this data—and that’s all automated through our processing pipeline.

Angus Stocking
And so those would be… the tagging would be automated, for example, or…

Kevin Grover
It will be down the road, definitely. What we’re doing now is we are classifying the point‑cloud data into really a layered dataset. We are layering a point cloud into different intelligent data classes. The next stages out of this are now taking this and allowing natural‑language processing using AI and machine learning to actually start finding these assets and creating intelligent three‑dimensional assets.

So for our power sector, we would love to know every single point of attachment and every single asset on a power pole. From a topographic‑survey perspective, we want to know every feature that should be part of a ground surface and then every vertical feature that we need to define and show in a three‑dimensional space on a plan. All of these things are what we’ve been missing in this industry for a long time: having terabytes of unordered, stupid point‑cloud data that we need to make sense of. We’re trying to do that with lighter‑weight data, imagery‑based extraction, and a series of automated and semi‑manual, semi‑automated tools to provide actionable data for our customers.

Angus Stocking
Okay, one more follow‑up question and then back to you, Nate. Right on your website, there’s an emphasis on the camera hardware technology and you’ve built your own device. What’s going on on the hardware side? What’s different about the Looq device compared to traditional photo‑capture technology?

Kevin Grover
Yeah, definitely. Honestly, we use—not off‑the‑shelf components, but it is a lot of off‑the‑shelf components. We’re not using any fancy cameras within our platform; it’s just that they’re adjusted and built into a camera rig, and they’re highly calibrated to allow us to do more precise photogrammetry. The GNSS device we have is similar to other GNSS hardware that’s used by other systems, other GPS survey equipment. It’s just another sensor and the cost of those has come down significantly.

Kevin Grover (23:12.472)
We just kind of bundled it into a nice form‑factor little platform that actually just does everything automatically. On our side, we’ve kept it simple. We don’t even have a power button on the device. Our app is purposely simple; we have a start and an end button. Everything else is basically automated along the way. You can’t change settings for how many pictures you take or change resolution, just because it allows us to fully optimize our workflow and our customers’ data to give them the best data possible purely from just turning our camera on and walking around a project site.

Angus Stocking
Great, thank you. And Nate, thanks for your patience. I know you’ve got a busy day to get back to. How did things work out on this particular project? I know you were creating… were you the ones creating the digital twin here, or were you handing off the data for that to be done? Was the client happy? How did the project work out for you?

Nate Dang
The client was happy with us. I think primarily they’ll use the 2D model and run with that. But they got something extra that they can use. They’ve got something extra that they can use during the construction process when they start rebuilding. I think one of the things that we offered the client on this project was kind of going above and beyond, giving them something extra and something of value, especially on a historical building and how it mates up with the rights‑of‑way of the streets and the infrastructure that’s around. And I think that was really beneficial. Sorry.

Angus Stocking
So this was a bit of an over‑deliver.

Nate Dang (24:43.116)
Yeah, I’m kind of an over‑deliver guy. Especially in this case, I would say.

Angus Stocking
Are you using the device more often now? Or was this a good pilot and now you’re looking for opportunities to use it?

Nate Dang
My plan is to have the guys use it on all of our projects, because like I say, it’s an augmentation to what we do. And I might not always use the data that we bring from it, but it’s there. Even if you go to the aspect of: I was on a site a particular day and this is what it looked like. When we walk around the site, it’s giving us thousands of images.

Even if we’re not using it or the end user is not using it, we have that data and we don’t have to go back to the site to say, “Hey, what does it look like right there at that catch basin? What does it look like over here when the grade break happens all strange and weird and underneath the car and underneath the tree and by the dumpster and over by the fence? What does that look like?” We have a record of all of those things.

Nate Dang (26:18.616)
Having that helps our drafters do their job. It helps us not go back to a site and revisit places that were difficult the first time. So our plan is to integrate it so we’re always using it. We haven’t quite gotten there yet. It takes a while to break in technology like this. It takes us a little extra time to learn and understand how to run it—not necessarily the handheld, but going from the 3D image that Looq provides into our CAD system. There’s some learning in there.

Angus Stocking
It occurs to me that that was kind of the promise from the beginning of scanning—that you could just slurp up all the data and spatial information you could, and you could do new surveys without going to the field, depending on what the client needed. You probably already had the data. And you’re saying that’s actually the case for you now and that it’s actionable, that you can do new survey work with the existing data.

Nate Dang
Yeah, absolutely. I think the thing for me is I’ve always felt like photogrammetry was a great tool that hasn’t been utilized. It’s really been in the dark ages forever. I was not an adopter of scanning and one‑billion‑point‑cloud points because I thought it was just overkill and too much. I let the big companies go and do that work. It was a business decision on my end to go that route.

I really like pictures. The point clouds to me were always way too much. They didn’t give me the information I wanted and they gave me a fuzzy picture of what was going on. What I really like with the Looq is I’ve got actual photos that I’m working with. And I think it’s much more sophisticated and, honestly, I’m surprised it took this long to get here because I’ve been trying to work with these.

Nate Dang (27:57.816)
Over the years they’ve integrated scanners into total stations and I’ve worked with the different models—the Trimbles and things like that—and tried to use it and get it to a user‑friendly deliverable and never been able to. I took a whack at it 15 years ago. I took another try at it seven, eight years ago. So when I saw this product, it really kind of jumped out at me as like, “Wow, this is something I’ve been trying to integrate for a decade and a half into our work.”

So that’s what I really love about it. And, you know, to me, it’s a little bit of an R&D situation still because it’s so new and people… it’s hard to get them out of the mold of “All these surveyors create these wonderful 2D drawings from our 3D world,” you know. But that’s where we’re headed with it, trying to get to where someone can actually go to the Looq platform, check out their site, and use the data.

Angus Stocking
Great. Kevin, Looq seems to have landed a kind of a big fish. It’s not so common for a new technology company, within five years, to be getting usable, desirable new tech into the hands of a land surveyor in the field, and it’s working out for you. Maybe we could wrap up here with your statement on how you see this getting used by land surveyors over the next year. What’s the market penetration going to be like? How common will it be to see a Looq device in the field?

Kevin Grover (29:47.198)
Happy to answer that. I think this is where I kind of put my sales hat on a little bit in this conversation as well. Yeah, I know, exactly. I’m on the technical side, but I have to deal with sales as well. To be honest, I think, Nate, you kind of hit the nail on the head. You want this to be used on all projects, kind of regardless of whether there’s a use case. I think that’s one of the biggest changes in the survey community. We’ve been very project‑focused with capture.

Nate Dang
Take it easy on him.

Kevin Grover (30:17.208)
Forever, a customer comes to you with a specific use case of “I need A to B, that’s it,” and we’ve been hyper‑focused on just delivering that for a number of reasons. A lot of our costs in the past have been labor; that’s it. We implement some technology that we have through GPS or conventional technology, but we go out in the field and we do traditional measurements, and it’s kind of a one‑off for a project.

But with us now, we can go out and, whether you really need to capture this data or not, we make it so easy to do. You can capture one to two acres of a project site within a 15‑minute collection, and that’s to get the higher‑accuracy data. You could technically walk around in five minutes and collect imagery just to get a bit of a picture and idea of what’s there.

I think drones have actually been one of the best technology implementations—best and worst. Best from just exposing the ease of capture and honestly bringing back photogrammetry to the general user. Photogrammetry has been around forever. It has been one of the longest‑standing technologies. It’s always been at the upper echelon of companies doing high‑end aerial mapping or satellite data, all of these high‑end captures.

Kevin Grover (32:00)
But we really exposed that with drone technology: now I can use drones, I can use a Mavic Mini, I can use even my phone through different applications, I can use any camera sensor and I can generate 3D products. So that’s really hit home to us. That’s what we’re focusing on as a company: we want to go after ease of capture on every project.

It allows you to change the mindset around how we offer services as a surveying professional. I don’t need to be told to just collect points A to Z. I want to generate A to Z, and I’m also going to generate “this,” and I’m going to use it to build “this” product. I think this is an opportunity now for the survey community—and honestly all these companies and communities we work for, like engineers and architects—to deliver new products.

I want new products other than stupid 2D CAD plans. I think that’s the biggest thing that we can focus on moving forward. And on our end, we’re just one of the steps to get you there. We want to allow you to do this fast capture, easy capture on absolutely everything, and we want to make the processing easy and take that out of your hands. But we want to give you actionable data that allows you to do your work more efficiently, make more money, build new products, offer new services.

Kevin Grover (32:41.088)
I think the market’s really been focusing on just one or the other. They’re focusing on the data collection, and then there’s maybe limited focus on just generating points and arcs. But we want to deliver asset‑ready, intelligent data that’s available at your fingertips whenever you need it.

Angus Stocking
Great, thank you. Very eloquent and appreciated. Nate, maybe a closing statement from you on the nuts and bolts. It sounds like you’re a business owner. How do you feel about the return on investment?

Nate Dang
I think return on investment has been really good for us. I feel like we’re still in the beginning stages of it, so I’m really kind of exploring that area. For me, I’m always looking to provide the best product. And I think I’m a guy that probably uses this product not so much for speed, but more for just gaining more, better data to give a more, better product to our clients.

You know, the emphasis is always on speed: you can go faster, you can get more and more and more. But that’s not— for our case anyway. You may have to interview someone else to promote the speed part. It’s really about the more, better data.

Angus Stocking (34:32.75)
Thanks for listening to this 27th episode of Everything Is Somewhere. I should have noted during the episode that Looq.ai is spelled L‑O‑O‑Q‑A‑I, and their website is Looq.ai. Check it out, they are a super cool company doing interesting stuff with tech very relevant to land surveyors.

Thank you to Kevin and Nate for taking the time out of their busy days to talk with us about a very interesting project and about the near future of photo‑capture technology. That’s all for this week. Please like and subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts, and it would be super awesome and I’d appreciate it if you would review an episode. I’d love to hear from you, whether you’re liking the podcast or have some thoughts.

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