SightPower is headquartered in Ottawa, Canada, with offices and development centres in Johannesburg, South Africa and Kharkiv, Ukraine.
SightPower globally provides digital transformation of a mine site and integration of all mining operations under the trademark Digital Mine TM. The concept of digital transformation assumes the implementation of Digital Twin: dynamic data model of a mine. Digital Twin reflects in real-time any developments and changes happening to a mine. Digital Mine suggests methodology for digital transformation, implementing at the first step integration into unified informational space data provided by monitoring, IoT, and fleet management systems, as well as simulation and modelling systems being used. Digital Mine allows the client to make effective business decisions by obtaining uninterrupted access to the distributed newly collected and historical mine spatial data regardless of its volume and actual location of data servers. The Digital Mine TM concept facilitates the optimization of mine-to-mill transition providing operational transparency and effective microplanning.
Implementation of the Digital Mine TM concept is based on the Mine Advisor TM platform, which includes a suite of instruments for geological modelling, simulation of emergency situations (mine flooding or tailing dam failures), mine design and planning, automated surveying with laser-based technologies, and informational support of mineshaft lifecycle, including ice-wall simulation models for mineshafts which are being built, and automated mineshaft inspection systems. SightPower suggests a best-in-class visualization engine with practically unlimited capabilities to combine spatial data of any type and any size (geological, CAD, GIS, seismic etc.), which are enhanced by innovative mixed and augmented reality features.
Tell us about yourself?
It happens that I started my career in the scope of spatial data analysis about 40 years ago, and then it led me to various entrepreneurial activities, business leadership and software development for mining, infrastructure, oil & gas, and spatial data processing. Being a third-year student at the mathematical faculty at Kharkiv National University of Ukraine, I joined the research group at the geological and geographical faculty, helping them with some oil & gas extraction simulation problems and getting stuck for my whole life.
I held the position of Lead Scientist for Kharkiv National University in Ukraine, and I used to manage numerous projects, including informational support and modelling for oil and gas exploration and gas processing plant control automation systems in West Siberia, as well as the water reservoir design system in Crimea (Ukraine). After an academic scholarship at Imperial College, London, UK, together with my team, I was engaged in a contract with the Royal School of Mines (Imperial College, London) to develop a unique processing engine for fractured seismic data of the region of Norway Sea. I moved to Canada in 1998. I started my career in Canada in engineering positions at Northwood Technologies and Marconi Corporation. Later, I gradually started three startup software development companies, holding CTO and CEO positions. I was one of the principal co-founders of Ambercore Inc. and served there as CTO heading the development of LiDAR point cloud analytic solution later acquired by Autodesk. In 2011, I co-founded SightPower Inc., a company focused on the digital transformation of the mining industry, 3D visualization for mining, construction, BIM, and infrastructural projects. In 2016, I co-founded Arvizio Inc. (www.arvizio.io), a software development company focused on the development of innovative mixed and augmented reality enterprise systems and held the CTO & Chief Scientist positions from 2017 until 2022. In 2022, I returned to SightPower Inc., where I currently hold the position of CEO and Chairman of the Board, combining it with the position of Senior Advisor at Arvizio Inc. During my career, I was the co-author and author of a few books and numerous publications in scientific and engineering journals
If you could go back in time a year or two, what piece of advice would you give yourself?
Being very focused on what you do is very important, but looking around is not less important.
What problem does your business solve?
We solve the problem of creating dynamic digital twins of industrial and mining objects.
What is the inspiration behind your business?
The mining industry of the 21st century has fallen behind in the Big Data revolution. Mining monitoring and hardware rapidly evolved to generate billions of data points every hour. However, the software has faced roadblocks in integration and processing and has not kept up the pace to make meaning of this growing dataset. While there are several point solutions on the market that solve specific problems, they often fail to integrate with legacy technology, leaving major gaps and inefficiency along the end-to-end mining operations workflow.
At SightPower, we have spent 10-plus years learning from the operational challenges faced by our customers, and we have built software solutions that seamlessly integrate across mining workflows to drive efficiency and millions of dollars in savings for our customers!
We help our clients to make their business operations effective and consistent.
What is your magic sauce?
Best-in-class visualization engine, no limitation integration capabilities, powerful simulation and operational optimization tools, unbeatable LiDAR data processing engine, holistic solution for mineshaft informational support, special product for what-if flooding event scenarios, and extensions for augmented and mixed reality
What is the plan for the next 5 years? What do you want to achieve?
The size of our company is about 40 people, and the technology developed is bigger than the size of the company in order of magnitude. So we are looking for strategic partnerships with some bigger companies who may properly market our technology and help to further develop our technological platform.
What is the biggest challenge you’ve faced so far?
With our solution, we are ahead of the market/mining industry readiness for digital transformation. Any system tries to keep homeostatic processes unchanged. Digital transformation of the mining business brings huge benefits and being eventually inevitably forces people to change their way of doing the operation and even their way of thinking. Natural fixedness of people is the main issue. The second issue is rather economical and psychological. Being a small company is very difficult to sell big solutions to much bigger companies. The third issue is fully political. We have a big development office in Ukraine, and we were severely hit by the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February of 2022. But we have great team, we consolidated and survived.
How can people get involved?
We are interested into getting in contact with a high-level managers responsible for technology innovations and digital transformation of their businesses for tier-1 and tier-2 mining companies.
For more information visit, www.sight-power.com or www.arvizio.io.