Mach9 Stopped Borrowing FTP Servers With a Files.com LiDAR Endpoint of Its Own

Mach9 builds AI software that turns mobile LiDAR scans into the deliverables surveying and engineering teams actually work in: CAD base maps, asset inventories, and GIS feature layers. Founded in 2021 by researchers from Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute, the company sells its Digital Surveyor platform to state departments of transportation, utilities, and the national engineering firms that serve them, automating extraction work that has traditionally taken those teams days to weeks per project.

Every one of those projects begins with someone else's data. Digital Surveyor runs on point clouds and imagery captured by its customers, and its ingest pipeline accepts data from all the major scanner manufacturers precisely because Mach9 never controls how a dataset was collected. Before the software can extract a single curb line, terabytes of raw LiDAR have to travel from a customer, a partner, or a prospect into Mach9's hands. File exchange is not a back-office function at Mach9. It is the first step of every relationship the company has.

Every Transfer Ran on Whatever the Counterparty Had

Mach9 had no exchange infrastructure of its own. In the surveying world, FTP is the entrenched standard for moving large datasets, so every transfer ran on the counterparty's server. That meant every new relationship opened with Mach9 asking for credentials to somebody else's FTP box. When the other side had no server to offer, the fallback was cruder: at one point, Mach9 was shipping hard drives.

“We just got tired of asking, like, hey, we need you to give us this data, do you have a server we can use? I think at some point we were sending hard drives around.”

The cost landed at the worst possible moment: the start of a relationship. Customers and OEM partners would send raw data only if it required no extra steps on their side. They would not reformat exports or adopt new tooling to accommodate a vendor, so the burden of every transfer fell on Mach9, using whatever aging infrastructure the other party happened to run. That infrastructure was unreliable, and a multi-terabyte upload that failed partway had to be restarted from the beginning.

Mach9 could not fix this by dictating tools to an industry. Its counterparties were national firms and public agencies with their own IT and twenty years of FTP habits, the datasets were far too large for email or consumer file sharing, and an early-stage team building perception software was not going to build and operate transfer infrastructure across dozens of outside firms.

Terabytes Inbound, With No Consistent Way to Receive Them

The volume was outgrowing the ad-hoc arrangements. An OEM partner that manufactures scanning hardware was ready to send terabytes of demo data, and its own legacy FTP server was one Mach9 had used directly and found painful. Established customers wanted to push terabytes of raw data in new categories for Mach9 to develop against. Mach9 also needed to move data outbound, sending ready-to-export files to surveying teams for validation runs, without opening yet another credential negotiation.

What the fix had to do was clear. Mach9 needed an exchange endpoint it hosted itself, speaking the FTP and SFTP the industry already uses so no counterparty had to install anything. It needed a browser path for the firms that would rather drag a project folder into a web page. It had to keep each firm's data separate from every other firm's, and it had to handle terabyte-scale uploads. Mach9 selected Files.com to be that endpoint.

A Scoped Account and a Dedicated Folder for Every Outside Firm

The build inverted the old arrangement. Instead of asking each counterparty for access to their server, Mach9 gave each one access to its own: a Files.com user account per outside firm, with a dedicated folder scoped so every firm sees only its own data. National engineering firms and state agencies connect over FTP or SFTP with the clients they already run. Less technical senders upload entire project folders straight from the browser, with nothing to install. Mach9's own team works the same files through the Files.com Desktop App.

The rollout was additive rather than a cutover. Mach9 stood up endpoints firm by firm as relationships came online. Provisioning the next counterparty takes one administrator minutes: create the user, create the folder, send the credentials. Co-founder Michael Mong runs the whole operation himself.

Terabytes Arrived, and No One Asked for Credentials

With the Files.com endpoint in production, Mach9 replaced borrowed servers and shipped hard drives with a single exchange point it controls.

• The OEM partner now uploads through the Files.com endpoint Mach9 stood up for it, replacing the legacy server Mach9 had found unusable.
• Dataset exchange with national engineering firms and public agencies runs through one platform, and most of the accounts on it belong to outside firms rather than Mach9 staff. Onboarding a new firm is a user and a folder, with no negotiation over whose server and no drives in the mail.
• Volume scaled with the business: storage on Files.com grew from 4 TB to more than 11 TB in the first year, and one client regularly pulls hundreds of gigabytes at a time from India.
• The pattern extended into the sales motion itself. Account executives now provision Files.com accounts so prospects can send real datasets and watch Digital Surveyor run against their own data, and when a product launch in early 2026 brought new counterparties, they landed on the same pattern instead of requiring new infrastructure.

Mach9 Became the Easy Party to Send Data To

Today, a data relationship at Mach9 starts with Mach9 handing over a login instead of asking for one. A surveying firm points the FTP client it has used for two decades at a folder that belongs to it alone. A prospect drags a project folder into a browser. The dataset that used to arrive on a hard drive in the mail, or through a credential request to someone else's aging server, is simply there when the team needs it. In an industry that was never going to change its tooling for a vendor, Mach9 did not ask anyone to. It hosted the endpoint on Files.com and let every counterparty keep the habits they already had, which made Mach9 the zero-friction party in every exchange and turned the hardest part of starting a relationship into the easiest.