Video: Matterport CEO RJ Pittman on Bloomberg Quicktake | Video courtesy of Matterport YouTube Channel | Original Air Date: Friday, 23 July 2021

Transcript (video above)

[00:00:00]
Tim Stenovec: ... The pandemic accelerated demand for Matterport's 3D renderings, physical spaces. The rush also pushed the company to release its first ever smartphone app which allows users to create a digital twin of a property in minutes. Joining us now to discuss is Matterport CEO, RJ Pittman. RJ, thanks so much for taking the time, it's great to have you on the show. Give us an overview of what exactly Matterport is for people who haven't necessarily interacted with the technology.

[00:00:28]
RJ Pittman: Sure. Matterport is a software platform that uses AI to create a dimensionally accurate digital twin of any physical space. In fact as you mentioned, you can now do it using any capture device, including the iPhone in your pocket.

[00:00:47]
Haslinda Amin: It's fascinating. How does this help with your bottom line in terms of have you seen a lot of demand during the pandemic? For example, during the lockdown, and how are you seeing that transform as the economy starts to reopen a bit?

[00:00:59]
RJ Pittman: Well, we have the advantage of being the market leader in a $230 trillion asset class, which is the built world. We're digitizing every type of property out there in the physical space, from homes to hotels, high-rises, offices, schools, factories, you name it. Through the pandemic, I think the most interesting part of the story is that Matterport's been doing this for 10 years now. We had already built quite a bit of momentum and acceleration into a host of new markets. Not just here in the US, but also in a 150 countries all over the world, people are Matterporting their spaces today. We were in position and in a great market for the future of Matterport with our Matterport for iPhone product as the pandemic surprised us all. I think while it was a terrific tailwind for us through a very interesting and challenging shelter in place situation for all of us, what we discovered is that businesses discovering Matterport for the first time were saying, "Where have you been all our lives? This is the great technology that's been hiding in plain sight for years," and so we've been delighted to just connect those dots in sign-ups and customers really for the long haul. Well past and going out of the pandemic.

[00:02:26]
Tim Stenovec: Yeah. I definitely have more questions on that in just a sec. I do want to start though and get back to today's debut for the public markets, more than $640 million raise. What's the plan for that capital that you're raising?

[00:02:39]
RJ Pittman: Yeah, look as mentioned, we've spent a lot of time in the last decade really perfecting product market fit, honing the technology, building an incredible IP portfolio, and connecting to a number of global use cases for this business. Today it's all about scale, scale and execution with a key focus on the enterprise. We're bringing in some of the most exciting companies onto the Matterport platform from the Fortune 1,000, as well as expanding internationally. It is a global phenomenon. There's over 4 billion buildings out there in the world to go Matterport, and today marks a fantastic leaping off point to go do that at a much more accelerated pace.

[00:03:23]
Tim Stenovec: Well, the public debut is through a special purpose acquisition company, a SPAC it's not a traditional IPO, although I think it's fair to say that's SPACs are becoming more traditional, more and more companies do them. Why go with the SPAC rather than a traditional IPO?

[00:03:36]
RJ Pittman: Well, in the case for Matterport, when we started looking at this opportunity a year ago, this is a company that was cash-flow positive from operations for several quarters. Plenty of money in the bank. We had just raised a private round, and so we were looking at IPO, staying private and raising a large private round as well as the SPAC route. At the end of the day for us, this was not a decision about SPAC or IPOs, we're very strategic, and we chose a partner that shared the long-term vision for Matterport, and that was Gores Group, and ultimately the Gores Group Holding VI SPAC vehicle. Because this was a unique combination of probably the markets most experienced SPAC investment group that's been doing this long before it became so popular, but also an incredibly strong technology investment team that knew exactly the markets that Matterport where they'd been investing in PropTech for years. We put the two together and just created an exciting partnership and then an investor syndicate in the pipe that was absolutely second to none, and I'm highly convinced as I'm sitting here today that this is the best investor group that I could get in any type of funding to bring this company out and push us towards our long-term vision.

[00:04:55]
Haslinda Amin: RJ, I want to ask you, what are the risks you're watching? What you have your eye-on and how are you addressing them?

[00:05:00]
RJ Pittman: The big challenges for companies like Matterport are primarily execution risk. We've got a scale and continue to accelerate this business in all of our enterprise markets, in all of our geographic regions that we're moving into as mentioned, building a business that is of a multi-billion dollar capacity where we're serving customers in over 150 countries is not for the faint of heart. That's why I built an extraordinary world-class leadership team from the biggest platforms in tech from Google, from Apple, from Facebook, LinkedIn, Salesforce. They've all come and joined the mission from Matterport with that same focus on creating execution and scale and really capitalizing on our first mover, first scalar advantage that we have to get a major part of this massive property marketplace that's out there for us to get.

[00:05:57]
Tim Stenovec: Yeah, and of course you yourself coming from eBay as a Chief Product Officer, RJ. Wonder about the other side of the pandemic and how investors should think about the staying power of Matterport when we hopefully at some point are looking in the rear view mirror at COVID-19. How do you make sure that demand for your product is still there?

[00:06:17]
RJ Pittman: Yeah, unequivocally, what COVID has done to society at large has accelerated digital transformations in just about any industry, and maybe created 5 to 10 years of acceleration of industries that have been transformed in the space of 6 to 9 months. For our category as we said, we were already accelerating and scaling pre-pandemic. But as I talk to CEOs of some of the largest residential and commercial real estate companies in the world, they are all locking in with technologies like Matterport and like Zoom and Slack and others, where these are phenomenal platforms to get tremendous efficiencies and productivity that you just didn't get without them, and we're highly convinced that for Matterport, this has set the stage for us and cleared a new path for us to move even faster, and as mentioned, move faster in engaging and bringing enterprise businesses onto the platform. We're seeing it today. It's continuing to accelerate the demand that's coming from all major regions in the world, and all of these really interesting verticals across the enterprise theater.

[00:07:38]
Tim Stenovec: Matterport CEO, RJ Pittman. RJ, thanks so much for taking the time and joining us on [Bloomberg] Quicktake, we really appreciate it.

[00:07:45]
RJ Pittman: Glad to be here.