Safwaan Majid
Founder
Safwaan has seven years of competitive robotics experience and conducted research at NASA. He designed and built Eratos’s physical rover end-to-end and programmed its autonomous pathfinding system.
See below.Dig with confidence.
Autonomous pre-dig subsurface intelligence for private-site excavation.
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Backed by
The problem
Construction teams still dig half-blind.
More than 20,000 utility strikes occur each year due to incorrect or incomplete markings, driving over $30 billion in utility damages annually. Underground uncertainty still causes delays, cost overruns, and dangerous strikes — and the process for knowing what’s beneath before excavation remains slow, fragmented, and unreliable.
Private utility uncertainty
811 covers public utilities — but private campus networks, internal conduits, and undocumented infrastructure remain invisible until the bucket hits them.
Delays, redesign, and rework
Unexpected underground conflicts force schedule stops, emergency redesigns, and costly rework that cascades through every downstream trade.
Strike risk and liability
Utility strikes cause explosions, service outages, environmental damage, and injuries. On private sites, the liability falls directly on the contractor and owner.
How Tracer works
From scan to deliverable in hours, not weeks.
01
Scan the site
Deploy Tracer to autonomously traverse the work area with ground-coupled GPR and EMI, collecting dense subsurface data on a precision survey grid.
02
Fuse subsurface + positioning data
RTK GNSS, LiDAR SLAM, and IMU fuse with GPR/EMI returns to build a spatially registered underground dataset with centimeter-level accuracy.
03
Detect utilities and confidence zones
Edge AI and physics-informed models identify buried utilities, classify material types, and assign confidence scores to every detected object.
04
Export engineer-ready outputs
Deliver CAD/BIM/GIS-ready utility maps, confidence-scored risk zones, and pothole recommendations directly into existing SUE and contractor workflows.
Subsurface visualization
See what's underground before the first bucket drops.
Tracer fuses GPR, EMI, and precision positioning to build a spatially registered map of buried utilities — color-coded by type, scored by confidence.
QL-B
quality-level data
±5cm
horizontal accuracy
5×
faster than manual
CAD/BIM
ready outputs
Why teams choose Tracer
Built for the firms that own underground risk.
Tracer is a force multiplier for SUE firms and contractors — not a replacement. It handles the repetitive fieldwork so your experts focus on judgment.
Demo
Tracer in motion
Autonomous traversal and subsurface sensing on site — the same rover-first workflow, in action.
Faster field collection
Cover more area per crew-day with autonomous scanning. Less manual cart-walking, more coverage.
Repeatable scans
Consistent scan density every time. No technician-to-technician variability, no missed zones.
Lower interpretation burden
AI handles first-pass analysis so your senior experts focus on QA and judgment, not repetitive radargram reading.
Cleaner deliverables
Engineer-ready digital outputs with confidence layers, not raw data that needs hours of manual processing.
Technology
Six layers of integrated intelligence.
Each layer of Tracer's sensing, positioning, and AI stack is purpose-built for subsurface utility intelligence.
Ground-coupled GPR
Stepped-frequency continuous wave radar with multi-channel arrays for deep, high-resolution subsurface imaging through varied soil conditions.
Electromagnetic induction
Active EMI sensing detects conductive targets and conductivity changes that GPR alone cannot resolve, completing the underground picture.
RTK + LiDAR SLAM
Tightly coupled GNSS, IMU, LiDAR, and odometry deliver centimeter-accurate positioning even in GPS-challenged environments.
Edge + cloud AI
On-board inference for real-time detection with cloud-based deep processing for final utility classification and confidence scoring.
Confidence-scored outputs
Every detected utility gets a classification confidence, material estimate, and depth range — enabling risk-based excavation decisions.
Autonomous path planning
Coverage-optimal navigation autonomously drives scan patterns across the site, ensuring complete subsurface mapping without manual guidance.
Team
Meet the team.
Aarnav Trivedi
Founder
Aarnav conducted physics research at the Naval Research Laboratory and leads Eratos’s sensor integration and subsurface-sensing development. He programmed the rover’s software suite end-to-end — from onboard data acquisition and signal processing to the mapping and deliverable pipeline — and connected it with the platform’s integrated hardware components into one unified system.
Alex Fagel
COO
A finance student at Dartmouth, Alex leads operations, team coordination, and organizational execution.
Monish Saravana
CMO
A computer science student at Harvard, Monish leads Eratos’s marketing, positioning, and go-to-market strategy.
Pravith Munipalle
CFO
A finance student at Cornell, Pravith leads financial planning, budgeting, and business strategy.
Get started
Map what matters.
Stop digging blind. See what’s underground before the first bucket drops.