Cesium Joins Bentley Systems

How Bentley Helps the Cesium Community

I’m so proud of our team. We have built an amazing business with Cesium. We have been consistently cash flow positive and grown by double digits every year since we spun out from Analytics Graphics, Inc. (“AGI”, now part of Ansys), five years ago. Perhaps we are a rare story, proving that doing the right thing for the ecosystem and the right thing for our colleagues, is also the right thing for business.

We’re fortunate; we have options. So why join Bentley? Because we believe that we can make the most progress in the shortest amount of time towards building the platform you need and deserve, more so than if we continued to run the company organically or raise outside capital.

Just like an acquiring company sees a path to accelerate their vision, we are joining Bentley to accelerate the Cesium community’s vision.

A Shared Commitment to the Open Ecosystem

Where we really see the open ecosystem ethos of Cesium and Bentley come together is with Bentley’s iTwin platform. As Keith Bentley, Co-Founder and former CTO of Bentley, stated in our podcast conversation in November 2022, Cesium inspired Bentley to build an open platform for digital twins for infrastructure engineering in the same style of Cesium: open source, open standards, and open APIs.

By joining Bentley, Cesium becomes part of a growing public company that shares its values and commitment to open standards and interoperability. Cesium capabilities will now extend to an infrastructure ecosystem representing some of the world’s largest and most significant projects and assets.

When thinking from the macro view of outer space or viewing an entire country to the micro view of being inside a building or under the Earth’s surface, bringing iTwin services to the Cesium community gets us there, further and faster.

The Future of Cesium and Bentley

The powerful combination of the iTwin and Cesium platforms will be an inflection point for the Architecture, Engineering, Construction, and Operations (“AECO”) and 3D geospatial ecosystems. We look forward to offering additional value, capabilities, and long requested features to Cesium users. Similarly, the continued availability of Cesium runtimes like CesiumJS, Cesium for Unreal, Cesium for Unity, and Cesium for Omniverse, in addition to curated data, and broad adoption of 3D Tiles, will enable significant advancements.

At the core is open standards and interoperability. We see an opportunity to accelerate the 3D Tiles roadmap, increase interoperability in the ecosystem, and create new open standards for specifications such as Bentley’s Base Infrastructure Schema (BIS) to interoperate with 3D Tiles and the community.

Bentley also shares our belief that easier access to data is a key driver of success. As such, we will be investing more in global and regional curated data and commercial data partnerships to enable you to build rich digital twins.

Last but certainly not least, by integrating 3D Tiles into Bentley’s Open Application ecosystem, we ensure long term and sustained support for Cesium and 3D Tiles. Such an integration will allow users to create workflows that work for you across domains and analytics.

My Role as Chief Platform Officer at Bentley

In some acquisitions, the founder steps away or has a transition plan to step away soon thereafter. Make no mistake about it, Cesium and the community we support along with our open standards advocacy is my life’s work. At age 42 and with a myriad of options to advance this work, I see joining Bentley as the best accelerator.

Bentley has given me the opportunity to be Chief Platform Officer with the honor to lead Cesium and iTwin over time. I will stay hands-on and engaged with the open standards community as we increase our support. We will continue to earn it every day as we build for and with the community to support an open ecosystem for digital twins of the natural and built environment.

Your Role as the Cesium Community

Joining Bentley is Chapter 3 for Cesium. Chapter 1 was our start in aerospace at AGI. Chapter 2 was our spinout company for geospatial and finding our way into Infrastructure. In each chapter, the community guided us. We invested in open source and open standards; we authentically asked for feedback; we listened; and we acted. It’s because of you that we built Cesium for Unreal, Cesium for Unity, Cesium for Omniverse, collaborated with Esri on integrations, started the Cesium Ecosystem Grants program, and so much more.

Chapter 3 will be no different. We have a compelling vision to expand into infrastructure and subsurface, strengthening the open platform to serve the software developer community building digital twins for the natural and built environment. We need you to continue to guide us by letting us know what matters most to you. What do you need to be even more successful? What integrations between Cesium and Bentley would you like to see soon? What broader ecosystem integrations do you want to see? What developer resources and support do you need?

The Journey

I still remember making the first commit to what became CesiumJS in February 2011. I also remember when it rendered the first red triangle. To think that the vast majority of open source projects don’t receive much traction, let alone have a successful business form around them, and that most venture-backed technology startups don’t make it, it is with abundant gratitude for and to the credit of our team and the community that, through ups and downs, we found a rare win-win-win across the board. It comes with a successful path for Cesium to:

• contribute a ton of open source and open standards to the community;
• enable thousands of applications and businesses;
• deliver value to our shareholders;
• provide a value creation accelerator for Bentley;
• continue doing what we do on a faster path

Thank you for your support of Cesium. We look forward to continued collaborations with you. Please celebrate with us, help spread the word, and share your thoughts and ideas with us on LinkedIn or the Cesium Community Forum.