From point cloud to survey-grade deliverables — in one click.
PRISM·lidarcloud turns raw drone and aerial LiDAR into bare-earth DEMs, surface and canopy models, and classified point clouds — one fully automated cloud run, reproducible to the byte, validated against surveyed control and USGS 3DEP. The compute takes a few hours. Your part takes a click.
Flying the site is the easy half. With traditional desktop workflows, the hard part starts after you land.
If you process LiDAR for a living, none of this is news — it's the standard toolchain, and everyone fights it. If these sound like your week, you're who we built this for.
The desktop pipeline is the bottleneck — not flying. Field crews collect faster than legacy tools can process.
The capable tools are expensive and license-locked — seats, dongles, maintenance, and one machine that can run the job.
Conventional DEMs round off the banks, scarps and breaklines your clients are actually paying you to capture.
Legacy desktop pipelines won't reproduce their own surface — rerun the same data and get a slightly different DEM, which is hard to defend in review.
In the desktop stack, classification is a separate manual step — another tool, another license, another day of cleanup.
Upload in the morning. Deliver in the afternoon.
Four steps from raw flight data to client-ready files — all in the browser.
Upload
Send your LAS/LAZ securely to the cloud. No conversion, no preprocessing on your side.
Process
Automated processing produces the bare-earth DEM, DSM, canopy height model at 25 cm, a classified point cloud, and per-cell uncertainty.
Inspect
Review everything in the browser — 2D map, 3D point cloud, elevation profiles, and click-to-identify on any surface.
Validate & deliver
Upload survey control points for an accuracy report following ASPRS Positional Accuracy Standards, cross-check independently against USGS 3DEP, and export CAD-ready DXF / LandXML / GeoTIFF with FGDC metadata.
This is the product. Not a mockup.
Every image on this page is rendered directly from PRISM·lidarcloud output rasters — real coastal mangrove and creek-cut forest sites, real data.
Ground under dense mangrove
Bare earth recovered beneath heavy coastal canopy — with the subtle relief intact, not flattened into a guess.
Vegetation, measured — not discarded
The same run that strips canopy from your DEM hands it back as a 25 cm canopy height model, ready for habitat, forestry, and clearance work.
Built for the deliverables you have to sign.
Most pipelines optimize for pretty. PRISM·lidarcloud optimizes for defensible.
Edges that survive
Banks, scarps and grade breaks are preserved, not smoothed away — measured: scarp crest within ~1 cm of survey, where the reference workflow rounds the same crest off by ~26 cm.
Reproducible by construction
The same input produces the byte-identical deliverable, run after run. When it's questioned in audit, you can prove it.
Integrated classification
Ground, vegetation tiers, buildings and water — labeled in the same run, not bolted on as a manual second pass.
Survey-grade datums
NAVD88 (GEOID18) heights and State Plane coordinates out of the box — including county-correct Florida zones.
Accuracy you can hand to a client
Accuracy statements following ASPRS Positional Accuracy Standards (2014 & 2023 conventions) from your checkpoints, plus an independent cross-validation against USGS 3DEP — in a client-ready report with a plain-language interpretation.
No GIS license required
Nothing to install, nothing to maintain, no seats to count. Open the browser, upload, and pay for what you process.
Same engine. Your terms.
Start in the cloud, or hand us the hard ones.
PRISM·lidarcloud
SaaS — upload and process in the browser, priced per area.
- Full deliverable stack: DEM, DSM, CHM, classified cloud, uncertainty
- Browser inspection: 2D map, 3D cloud, profiles, identify
- Checkpoint + USGS 3DEP validation reports
- CAD-ready DXF / LandXML / GeoTIFF exports
- Per-area pricing — no seats, no annual license
Pro Services
We process your backlog — or your hardest sites — for you.
- Backlog clearing: send the archive, get deliverables back
- Difficult terrain: dense canopy, coastal, steep and cut sites
- Validation and accuracy reporting included
- Your branding on the final deliverables
Don't trust us — test us.
Run your hardest site through it yourself — free trial, full engine, no card. Put our deliverables next to your current tool's. Keep whichever is better.
Start your free trialPrefer it done for you? Pro Services — or write to us about anything.
Who's behind it
Built by the team behind a decade of University of Florida airborne-LiDAR research.
Eben N. Broadbent·Angelica M. Almeyda Zambrano·Jason Drake·Paul Medley