September 4, 2025
Cintoo is an all-in-one platform for reality and 3D scan data synergy. By managing 3D scan data from the built environment, Cintoo empowers teams to leverage reality capture data and maximize BIM and digital twin workflows. We recently had the chance to interview Dace Campbell, Product Manager & Business Manager of XR & Metaverse at Cintoo. Read our conversation below.
BrainXchange: What is Cintoo’s origin story and where did the name come from?
Dace: Cintoo got its start when now-CEO Dominique Pouliquen met 3 researchers working on mesh-compression technology, and encouraged them to apply it to laser scan data. The name Cintoo originates from Monte Cinto on Corsica, because one of Cintoo’s original co-founders is from Corsica, and creating the company was his “Mt. Everest.”
Since then, Cintoo has quickly scaled, surpassing Series B funding and expanding globally, across all important industries.
BrainXchange: Digital twins aren’t entirely new but are a “hot” topic right now in enterprise. Why do you think that is?
Dace: Enterprises and professionals across industries such as AEC, manufacturing, and energy face multiple crises and challenges in the 21st century, including sustainability, productivity, and labor equity. Businesses are innovating to mitigate the impacts of these crises, and technology innovation is at the center.
Businesses are looking to synchronize a virtual, digital representation with corresponding real-world facilities, assets, and processes, and organize and update them to be meaningful for long-term operations. This mandates a clear strategy for data flow between physical and digital counterparts, providing a spatial experience that taps into our innate understanding of the world as evolved primates. We need a digital experience of real-world data, just as we need a physical experience of virtual data!
This is where digital twins come in, enabling better decision-making, bridging the gap between design intent and real-world performance in context of facility lifecycle management, and providing a single source of truth. Digital twins harness and integrate a host of emerging and enabling technologies, including reality capture, AI, XR and robotics.
BrainXchange: Are digital twins only for heavy industry?
Dace: In a word: no! While AEC, manufacturing, and energy are among Cintoo’s favorites, digital twins apply across other industries, including aerospace, healthcare/medicine, cities, and more. Any industry that benefits from a spatial model/database to collect and organize multiple, dynamic sources of information would benefit from a digital twin. Starting at the point of data coordination and strategic understanding, anyone can utilize the power of digital twins without having to be an expert in the field.
BrainXchange: What are some of the most common roadblocks your customers face when it comes to both digital twin creation and implementing digital twins into real workflows?
Dace: Our customers typically face a handful of challenges when creating and implementing digital twins, including:
· Unclear specs with little precedent
· Lack of mandates or standards
· Lack of proof points / insufficient track record
· Heavy investment of resources for long-term payoff/return
· Unclear chain of custody or accountability
· New, unprecedented jobs, roles, and responsibilities
BrainXchange: What are the challenges of using traditional assets like BIM data and CAD models for immersive/digital twin applications?
Dace: CAD and BIM data are traditionally limited to representation, and don’t often illustrate or describe the simulation or behavior of a facility, nor can they predict or optimize those behaviors. Similarly, “Virtual Design and Construction” (VDC) efforts, which can simulate behaviors during early phases of a facility’s lifecycle, typically fall short of doing so for facility operations and maintenance.
Generally, it’s best to include BIM and CAD data as part of a digital twin strategy, but they are limited to representing design intent or the idealized record of how things should be (and should have been) constructed. Nothing is ever truly built to hypothetical abstract conditions! Floors aren’t flat, walls aren’t vertical, concrete cracks, steel rusts, etc.
With reality capture (LiDAR, photogrammetry, radiance fields, 360 imagery, etc), we can accurately document real-world conditions as they were truly built, which often takes precedence over idealized CAD/BIM geometry. Reality capture complements abstract planar geometry to document the gaps between as-intended and as-is conditions, giving a complete picture that building asset owners can rely on to make effective decisions.
BrainXchange: How is Cintoo making digital twin creation more accessible for enterprises?
Dace: Cintoo is making digital twin adoption more accessible by removing many of the traditional barriers that have slowed adoption up until this point.
Unlike platforms that restrict access through costly licensing models, Cintoo offers unlimited users a way to develop and utilize the power of digital twins. This means collaboration that isn’t restricted by geographical or technical boundaries. Whether you’re in the field, at the office, or orchestrating a global team, digital twins can be created and accessed by everyone. The platform is also designed to meet users where they are, offering a highly intuitive interface that doesn’t require specialized training, so teams can start working with complex scan data right away.
By converting massive point cloud datasets into lightweight, high-resolution meshes, Cintoo provides a powerful visual foundation for building digital twins. Combined with interoperability across BIM, GIS, and digital twin ecosystems, enterprises can scale their digital twin initiatives without complexity.
In the next phase of helping companies scale their digital twin initiatives, Cintoo is rolling out “Digital Twin Solutions,” where a dedicated product manager will be available for clients to help scale and develop their digital twin ecosystems.
BrainXchange: Do you think it’s necessary for companies to hire developers with experience in creating digital twins?
Dace: It’s not necessary, but it can help. It’s more important to hire service professionals as expert agents with experience creating and maintaining digital twins (A/Es, owner’s reps, etc). It’s also important to have an experienced product management or change management team capable of driving projects/programs for tech integration, with keen eye towards business value and solving real problems with technology innovation.
Ultimately, it’s essential to build a tech portfolio with solutions compatible with a cohesive, long-term business strategy. It’s why Cintoo is implementing “Digital Twin Solutions,” where an expert product manager will help the client with their larger strategic digital twin process. This includes data coordination, understanding the requirements and standardizations, evaluating cloud to cloud integrations, and supporting the scale and adoption of the digital twin ecosystem, with the goal to help educate users and streamline development. In this way, “digital twin” becomes less of a buzz word. Instead, the gap between the physical and virtual can be bridged, leading to even more opportunities in implementing reality capture, AI, XR and robotics.
BrainXchange: In your experience, what is the most popular application for digital twins today?
Dace: Ultimately, digital twins are best applied in support of more effective decision-making, simulating outcomes and optimizing performance before, during, and after construction. Leveraging this decision-making, digital twins are commonly applied to improve:
· Operational insight & efficiency
· Lifecycle management
· Stakeholder engagement & alignment
· Proactive maintenance
· Sustainability & climate adaptability
· Compliance & risk management
Cintoo’s Twin Edition option offers users the tools and solutions to be able to support all applications of the digital twin, across multiple phases of project delivery.
BrainXchange: Can the same digital twin serve multiple functions/departments within an organization?
Dace: Yes, and we have seen it in some best-in-class examples like airports and hospitals, where the same aggregated dataset informs decisions about both the facility operation/maintenance, as well as the business operations (data flow, occupant flow, traffic control, etc).
However, just as likely, if not more so, multiple digital twins are created and executed on a single entity or facility. In design, a digital twin can represent clear spatial design intent, and then portray and ultimately predict facility or asset behaviors. In construction, digital twins help ensure an accurate match between the real world and as-built documentation, help evaluate project performance between planned and actual, and derive insights about optimized construction process and performance. In operations, digital twins empower teams to act on the physical facility or assets based on accurate, aligned, sensored, and well-attributed data, and help optimize, automate, predict, and proactively plan maintenance and improvements. So you might have three different digital twins, each with their own unique value proposition, depending on the phase in a facility’s lifecycle.
BrainXchange: What’s next for Cintoo?
Dace: Cintoo is evolving from a focus on cloud-based scan data management SaaS to a full-featured digital-twin and Metaverse leader, in a few ways:
· We are scaling growth globally, especially in the US and Europe.
· We are helping users make sense of their data with AI-enabled asset-tagging, data segmentation, and classification.
· We are establishing a deeper connection with popular industry platform solutions by Autodesk, ESRI, and Procore, enabling seamless workflows and scan-to-model coordination.
· We are helping forge the Industrial Metaverse, with the Cintoo VR Experience application, a streaming SDK, and plugins for popular XR platforms to professionals an immersive, collaborative experience of high-fidelity scan data. Read more on Cintoo’s VR Experience.
Try Cintoo today or visit us at booth 109 at Augmented Enterprise Summit. We look forward to meeting you there!
