The geospatial AI revolution: Wherobots leads the charge

Geospatial data has driven innovation and decision-making for generations, first through maps and cartography and now through autonomous systems, real-time logistics, advanced weather monitoring, and even battlefield management. Yet, only one in ten data engineers truly understands how to handle geospatial data effectively.

In the coming decades, the volume of available spatial data will explode by orders of magnitude; we call this the “silent flood”:

• NASA's earth observation data is expected to grow from 57 petabytes to 247 PB by 2025
• The number of spacecraft launched annually has doubled every two years since 2015
• IoT devices are set to nearly double from 15.1B in 2020 to 40B by 2030 
• Location-enabled apps like Uber and Lyft process terabytes of data daily for real-time operations. 

An open secret of geospatial data is that it contains priceless information on behavior, mobility, business activities, natural resources, points of interest, and more. Geospatial data can turn into critically valuable insights and create significant competitive advantages for any organization. Geospatial data powers many of our world’s most mission-critical industries, and yet large-scale spatial processing, analytics, and AI is concentrated within the hands of large tech companies. We fundamentally believe that better big data infrastructure platforms unlock markets - enabling thousands more organizations to put their internal data to work and unlock novel use cases, as we’ve seen with Databricks building upon Spark and Confluent with Kafka.

And the industry is taking notice:

• Geospatial data applications now form a significant portion of Databricks's total libraries – surpassing Computer Vision, Speech Recognition, and Recommender Systems combined
• Geospatial AI is also growing 145% YoY faster on Databricks than Hugging Face

Today, we’re proud to announce we’ve led the Series A in Wherobots, the global leader in spatial intelligence. They’re building a platform for organizations to manage, store, analyze, and use their geospatial data, including a purpose-built data lakehouse. It treats spatial data as a first-class citizen by extending the functionality of distributed compute frameworks like Apache Spark, Apache Flink, and Snowflake. Like many foundational data and AI companies, Wherobots began as an open-source project. In 2017, Mo and Jia released the first version of Apache Sedona (formerly named GeoSpark) at Arizona State University, where Mo was an assistant professor, and Jia was his doctoral student. Three years later, Sedona was accepted into the Apache Foundation. Since then, they have seen explosive growth with over 38 million downloads, growing at 200% YoY. Sedona is used by over 30,000 organizations globally, including many F500 and industry giants like Apple, Amazon, Instacart, Uber, Mercedes, and Zillow. 

Apache Sedona enables planetary scale workloads 50x faster than state-of-the-art solutions like Apache Spark. Wherobots has now built an enterprise-grade geospatial data engine that seamlessly integrates into existing stacks and workflows, delivering performance 10x faster than their open-source project and up to 60x over traditional solutions. In addition, they recently launched WherobotsAI, a new suite of AI and ML-powered capabilities that unlock spatial intelligence in satellite imagery and GPS location data.

Our belief in Wherobots is rooted in the exceptional capabilities of its founders, Mo Sarwat and Jia Yu, co-architects of Apache Sedona. Their contributions to the world's most advanced geospatial projects are a testament to their expertise and vision. They’ve both made the difficult decision to leave their tenure-track professorships to change the way we work with data in the physical world. Finally, they’ve assembled one of the best early-stage teams - pulling senior technical and GTM hires from Databricks, AWS, Splunk, Elastic, and Carto.

We're witnessing a convergence of trends that could usher in a golden age of spatial intelligence: increasing volumes of quality data, access to compute power, and improved underlying hardware. Wherobots is poised to be the leader of geospatial data, unlocking new markets and use cases we've only begun to see.

In the race to map our physical world's data intelligence, Wherobots isn't just surveying—it's charting the course. The geospatial revolution is here, redrawing the boundaries of what’s possible.