From film scanners to hybrid camera-LiDAR systems and a 43-country data program, Vexcel’s CEO Alexander Wiechert described the journey leading to the current product line in a conversation with xyHt at INTERGEO in Frankfurt.
Walking past the Vexcel booth at INTERGEO 2025, you see Merlin, Osprey 4.2, Condor and Dragon 4.2 front and center: sleek housings, crisp sample imagery, and dense point clouds looping on screens. But in Wiechert’s telling, all of that starts in a very different place.
“Vexcel, when the company was started, it developed aerial film scanners because we were still analog,” he recalled. “Film was a medium for aerial photos, and we developed a scanner for it.”
The team pivoted to digital just as large-format aerial photography was about to go through disruption.
“At that time, the sensors, the CCD sensors, they were rather small, like those used in DSLRs,” he said. “Aerial flying is expensive, so being very efficient is important.”
Vexcel’s answer was the original UltraCam Digital (UCD), announced in 2003. The key idea was to synthesize a large frame from multiple small CCDs while preserving true photogrammetric geometry.
“We were building this big frame, where we were composing it out of nine sub images,” Wiechert explained. “These sub images are oriented between four lenses, and the lenses are lined up in flight direction and exposed with a slight delay, so that when you build together the final image… it looks like it would have been taken at the same geographical location. That’s what we call syntopic exposure.”
The result: a footprint that behaved like a single large sensor but built from multiple off-the-shelf components, an approach that still shapes the family today.
“That idea was really the foundation of Vexcel in the aerial engineering part,” he said. “We were the new kids on the block. And after two years, we were on par with the other companies in selling cameras… in a conservative industry, being the new kids on the block, that speaks for the technology.”
From that point forward, the overarching goal has been consistent: increase flying efficiency. Wider footprints, faster frame rates, lower weight. “Getting this footprint as wide as possible, making the cameras faster, so that you can fly faster, making them lighter, so that you can carry more fuel and less technology,” Wiechert said. “All these iterations, but also revolutionary steps, happened over all these years.”
Inside Microsoft: Building the Digital Globe
If UltraCam’s first act was about sensor geometry, its second was about scale.
Vexcel was acquired by Microsoft in 2006, after Bill Gates laid down his “Digital Globe” vision for online mapping. “He was sharing this vision of a Digital Globe on the internet, like Google did at that time,” Wiechert said. “Then Microsoft thought, okay, how can we fulfill the vision of Bill Gates?”
The answer: buy both hardware and algorithms. “They took notice of Vexcel and the aerial cameras,” he said, “but also Vexcel at that time was very far ahead in developing software algorithms where we are using overlapping aerial imagery to generate models. We had 10 very successful years in Microsoft.”
Inside the company, UltraCam was not a side project. “We went into Microsoft with 25 people, and we grew up to 75, 80, 90,” he said. Vexcel became responsible not just for aerial cameras but for a broader range of imaging platforms:
- City oblique systems for dense urban 3D capture
- High-altitude wide-area systems for continent-scale mapping
- Car-mounted systems to drive street corridors
- A photogrammetrically stable backpack with 360° field of view
“We developed car-mounted system, a camera system, which is mounted in cars to drive in cities, manufactured approximately 140 of them,” he recalled. “We developed a backpack system, which you can carry, 360-degree field of view, but all photogrammetric stable… so the 3D points are always photogrammetric driven.”
Throughout, the core principle didn’t change. “Image quality, photogrammetric stability was a kind of a North Star for all these years,” he said.
Vexcel grew, broadened its product portfolio and became central to Bing Maps. The second existential moment came under CEO Satya Nadella, when Microsoft refocused on cloud and core software. The Vexcel company principals bought Vexcel from Microsoft as corporate strategy shifted; the buyout closed in 2016 and additional private equity and strategic investors have helped Vexcel continue to scale. “We survived two very critical moments of a company,” he said. “One was going inside Microsoft and surviving, and the other one was going out and surviving.” Today, Vexcel has grown from roughly 70–75 people in Graz to over 500.
Grey Sky, Blue Sky: From Hardware to a Global Data Program
Once independent again, the question was how to grow beyond a single product line.
“Being a relatively small company in Austria with a single hardware product—how sustainable could this be for many, many years?” Wiechert asked. “What else can we achieve with our technology?”
The answer emerged creatively from climate-driven extreme weather events. In 2018, Vexcel partnered with the National Insurance Crime Bureau (NICB) on the idea of rapid disaster mapping.
“We were saying that we can fly for them and generate geospatial data in a disaster,” he said. “And Irma was approaching, and then they said, ‘Okay, the hurricane is coming now. So, what can you do?’ And we did it.”
That was the birth of what Vexcel now calls Grey Sky. Grey sky missions are funded primarily by insurers, but the data can be shared far more widely.
“When the hurricane kicks in, the insurance pays for the flight, but the data goes online,” he explained. “It goes to the Red Cross, to the police, to NOAA, to fire departments. It’s displayed for free… the thinking behind this is: a flood raises all boats.”
Operationally, the model is tight. “We have 24 hours turnaround time,” he said. “We fly, we process overnight and the next day you have it.”
One of the benchmark missions was Puerto Rico. “Eighty-five thousand square kilometers in three days,” Wiechert said. “The whole territory, the whole rescue operation,” with high-resolution Vexcel imagery as a common operating picture.
Very quickly, customers began asking the obvious question: what did it look like before? That led to Blue Sky, a systematic, global mapping program.
“And then we added what we call blue sky. So, we are doing our own regular flights of cities and continents to collect standard data.”
Today, Vexcel’s aircraft and partners fly more than 43 countries. Some cities are remapped annually, others every two years; entire countries are flown on multi-year cycles. “We are daily in the air with dozens of cameras around the globe,” Wiechert said.
The business impact is profound. Where Vexcel once relied almost entirely on camera sales, data now accounts for roughly two-thirds of revenue, with hardware about one-third. “The camera is now about 1/3 of the overall revenue,” he noted.
But for surveyors and mapping firms, the more important impact is technical.
The Second Cake: How Vexcel Uses (and Doesn’t Compete with) Its Customers
There are roughly 450 UltraCam systems sold into the commercial market; Wiechert estimates around 200 are still actively flying. Those cameras are not just endpoints, they’re part of the Vexcel engine.
Many of those customers now fly for the Data Program. “Everywhere outside the U.S., we are working together with our UltraCam customers,” he said. “We invite them to go flying for us. So, they are a customer on the hardware side… but in return, we are inviting them to fly for the Vexcel Data Program.”
In disasters, that means pick up the phone. “When there’s a disaster, we call and say, ‘There’s a disaster, please fly for us,’” he said.
In peacetime, it means blue-sky contracts that don’t cannibalize tender work. “We are not going on tenders with our specifications,” Wiechert stressed. “They can do their standard work. I always explain it: we are not eating from their cake, we put a second cake on the table, invite them to jointly work on that.”
On the back end, Vexcel gets a globally consistent dataset, all collected with the same camera families and processed through the same UltraMap pipeline.
“As we are using the same sensors, the same cameras around the globe to collect our Vexcel data, and we are using the same software to process it, that means it’s a worldwide, consistent data set,” Wiechert said. “I can look on imagery taken in Australia, in Europe and in Washington, and they are flown on the same specification, processed in the same way, they look identical.”
For AI and analytics, that consistency is gold. “If you throw AI algorithms on it to classify, to extract metadata information,” he said, “these algorithms have the same underlying data quality, deliver consistent, comparable results.”
It also feeds back into the products themselves. The consistency and high quality that Vexcel gets out of it can help power and improve the UltraMap software.
Wiechert emphasizes that the loop is central. “Everything we improve for the Vexcel Data Program is an improvement for our customer base,” he said. “The learning we achieve is also a benefit for our customers… we don’t have two code bases. It’s one software.”
The Current Product Line: Merlin, Osprey, Condor, Dragon 4.2
All of that history shows up directly in the camera lineup Vexcel had on display in Frankfurt.
Merlin: The New Nadir Workhorse
At the classic photogrammetric end, Vexcel has refreshed its nadir line with the UltraCam Merlin. It sits squarely in the “photogrammetric nadir” class that surveyors use for ortho, engineering mapping and corridor work.
“This is traditional photogrammetric work flown with nadir, looking cameras,” Wiechert said. “Highest position, highest accuracy, measurement accuracy in the centimeter, in the inch and half inch range.”
Photogrammetric Z accuracy, he emphasized, is still fundamentally tied to GSD and geometry. “Typically in the range of 1.5 to 2 times ground sample distance,” he said, and up to around three GSD in unstructured terrain. “If you fly a 5 centimeter resolution imagery, the accuracy is probably in the range of 7.5 to 10 centimeter, so reasonable for most applications.”
Merlin uses Sony’s latest large-format CMOS, designed into a new lens system that significantly increases footprint. “The driver behind this development now is the roadmap of the sensors,” he said. “Sony is the leading one in this aerial application field. They launched a new sensor… enabling the cameras to become more efficient.”
“In the Merlin, it increased the footprint from 30,000 to 37,000 pixels,” Wiechert said. “In percentage, that’s just huge. Saves you a ton of flight lines, saves you a ton of money in the flying.” For operators, that roughly 20% footprint bump translates almost one-to-one into fewer strips. “Strip means 20% less flying,” he said. “So, the 20% less flying—that’s one-to-one savings.” With camera systems in the €750,000–€1.5 million range, shaving 20% off flight hours has a direct impact on ROI.
The Merlin represents Vexcel’s Bayer-pattern–based flagship product, while the UltraCam Eagle 4.1 remains its panchromatic-based flagship. Both photogrammetric nadir product lines feature user-exchangeable lens kits. “This is unique in the market. It allows our customers to swap lenses in the field without the need for recalibration, so they can leverage the large footprint at different altitudes based on their mission requirements,” Wiechert explained.
Osprey 4.2: Oblique for Cities and 3D Twins
For urban 3D and digital twin projects, the UltraCam Osprey 4.2 combines nadir and multi-angle obliques in one housing.
“We have what we call photogrammetric oblique,” Wiechert said. “Here we are combining nadir cameras with oblique capture capability, the Osprey. We fly these cameras for the Vexcel Data Program, but also customer flights worldwide. These are cameras used when it comes to cities, they get great nadir imagery, but also fantastic for façades.”
As with Merlin, the Sony sensor bump increases the footprint and reduces strips. The geometry is tuned for robust mesh generation in dense urban environments, exactly the environments Vexcel flies for its own Blue Sky city program.
Condor: High Altitude, Wide Area
At national-map scale, Condor systems are built to fly high and cover entire countries.
“Our Condor, high altitude, wide area—that’s a third bucket which we have,” Wiechert said. These systems underpin a lot of the “continent mapping” that started in the Microsoft era and continues in Vexcel’s Data Program: uniform, wide-area imagery suitable for basemaps, land management, insurance risk layers and more.
Dragon 4.2: Hybrid Imagery + LiDAR
Then there’s the hybrid line, which Vexcel positions as a fourth bucket: Dragon 4.2, combining UltraCam imagery and RIEGL LiDAR in a single calibrated housing.
“A few years ago, we launched another bucket with our hybrid sensors,” Wiechert said, “where we are combining imagery—nadir, oblique imagery—together with high resolution LiDAR, so that you can collect imagery and LiDAR data integrated in one housing… with planes which have only one IMU, and it’s geo-referenced.”
The LiDAR is sourced from fellow Austrian engineering house RIEGL. “RIEGL plus Vexcel, we integrated that into our Dragon, where we also have launched a new iteration, improved LiDAR and the new Sony. So that’s a beast on the hybrid.”
The LiDAR (he referenced the VQ-6080 family) provides multi-beam coverage and high pulse rates; the cameras supply high-resolution texture and geometry. Because the system is factory-calibrated, surveyors don’t have to constantly fight cross-calibration of separate pods and IMUs.
As with the film-to-digital transition two decades ago, Vexcel’s stance on photogrammetry vs LiDAR today is pragmatic: you need both, in the same coordinate and quality framework.
Software as the Quiet Enabler
Behind the hardware is UltraMap, Vexcel’s production software. It is not a GIS, and Vexcel insists it never will be.
“Our software stack only produces the basic data, like the imagery, some meta information, some classification,” Wiechert said. “But we don’t have a GIS product. So, we are not sitting at the end customers desks.”
Instead, UltraMap is tuned for large-scale, mostly automated production, exactly what Vexcel needs for its own Blue Sky and Grey Sky work. “We could collect better data in a shorter time than the competition, and we could process it faster,” he said. That same toolchain goes to UltraCam customers; there is no “internal” fork.
On top of that, partners build applications.
“ESRI is a great partner for us,” Wiechert said. “We are a horizontal platform. Then please grab our data, put them into your application, and then have fun with the results.”
More broadly, “the Vexcel Data Program has a whole partner spectrum,” he said. “They are grabbing our data and then supplying market specific applications, analysis, AI, classification, all these things.”
That may be the most important architectural choice Vexcel has made: produce data and tools to rigorous, photogrammetric standards, but leave domain-specific analytics and interfaces to surveyors, GIS professionals and vertical ISVs.
Position in the GIS & Surveying Ecosystem
Vexcel’s cameras and data now sit under many of the same users as ArcGIS and other enterprise platforms, but at a different layer of the stack.
“Our software is a data production software,” Wiechert underlined. “It’s complementary in the workflow.”
Government agencies and large enterprises can buy Vexcel data and ingest it into their own GIS; mapping firms can use UltraCam systems and UltraMap to generate their own high-end base layers and deliver them in whatever formats their clients need.
Meanwhile, ESRI and others benefit from having a consistent, global, high-resolution content layer.
With Blue Sky, that content is now worldwide and consistent, giving AI and analytics teams a predictable foundation for damage detection, risk scoring, asset management and urban change detection. With Dragon 4.2 and hybrid systems, those same stacks can tap into LiDAR-derived height and structure directly alongside imagery.
For surveyors, that raises a simple question: where do you want to sit in this ecosystem? Operating UltraCam or Dragon systems under your own control? Flying for Vexcel’s “second cake”? Building vertical applications that ride on Blue Sky coverage? All three are now on the table.
Much More Than Just a Camera
It was clear from the INTERGEO conversation that Merlin, Osprey 4.2, Condor and Dragon 4.2 are not just incremental upgrades, they’re expressions of the path the company has taken.
“Vexcel is much more than just a camera,” Wiechert reflected. “The cameras are the reason for the success of the data business,” he added. “Look how we could collect better data in a shorter time than the competition, and we could process it faster.”
From film scanners to syntopic large-format frames, through a decade inside Microsoft, two near-existential transitions, the emergence of a 43-country data program and a hybrid camera–LiDAR line, Vexcel has become something closer to a global mapping engine than a traditional hardware vendor.
For professional surveyors and GIS practitioners, that matters. It means the hardware you buy is the same hardware the manufacturer uses every day at industrial scale. It means the software you run has been hardened on tens of thousands of flight hours. And it means the data you either produce or license will drop cleanly into the same GIS and analytics stacks your customers already use.
Or, as Wiechert put it on the floor in Frankfurt, summing up both the journey and the state of play: “Data and knowledge is the secret sauce, those are the results of the technology.”