Case Study: Spotscale achieves scalable, high-fidelity 3D city modeling with Microsoft Azure

The Spotscale Cloud, powered by Microsoft Azure, uses cloud-based processing technology and workflow to deliver reality capture–based, high-fidelity 3D modelling of a Swedish city

Spotscale, a Swedish startup founded in 2013, uses multirotor drone imagery and advanced computer-vision algorithms to create high‑fidelity 3D reconstructions for city planners, developers, environmental scientists and game developers. The company needed to move beyond processing small blocks to large urban areas—often tens of thousands of images—while keeping costs low and giving customers direct access to and control over the data.

By running its pipeline on Microsoft Azure, Spotscale spins up tailored virtual machines (GPU, memory, storage) and uses Azure Blob storage on demand to process and transfer massive datasets—enabling the successful creation of a 3D model from 140,000 images covering 40 city blocks and a customer-facing SaaS portal. The cloud approach eliminated heavy upfront hardware costs, let Spotscale parallelize workloads for speed and scale, and positioned the company to win thousands of similar projects while adding machine-learning features for automated labeling and richer analytics.

Spotscale

Pablo Jomer

Web Architecture Lead