Zeitview

Zeitview is an aerial-inspection company founded in 2014 and headquartered in Santa Monica, California, led by founder and chief executive Dan Burton. Originally launched as DroneBase, it rebranded to Zeitview in February 2023 as it expanded beyond drones into crewed aircraft and ground-based capture. It inspects solar farms, wind turbines, utility infrastructure, telecom towers, and property, running the captured imagery through computer-vision models and having human analysts finalize the reports.

Its product lines are organized by asset: Solar Insights for photovoltaic inspection covering thermal anomalies, hotspots, and string outages; Wind Insights for turbine blade damage — including internal blade inspection using caged drones and crawlers, a genuine differentiator — plus Utility, Property, and construction-progress lines. Capture is delivered through a network of local drone pilots who claim missions through the company's app, and its North American Solar Scan project has rated large United States solar assets on a standardized scale.

Zeitview is unusually credible on artificial intelligence for its sector, and unusually honest about its limits. Its in-house research team published a peer-reviewed paper on detecting barely-visible surface cracks on wind-turbine blades, trained on a proprietary dataset of thousands of real cracks drawn from thousands of inspections across dozens of manufacturers — and it published the actual numbers rather than hiding them. Those numbers are modest: the best model catches most cracks but flags roughly one false positive for every two real ones, which is precisely why trained human analysts review every proposed defect. The company is a hybrid of software and services, and its rigorous published evidence covers wind blade cracks specifically rather than the solar product.