Announcing Our 21.5M Series A :: Unlocking Answers to Planetary-scale Questions.

Unlocking answers to planetary-scale questions.

By Wherobots co-founders Mo Sarwat and Jia Yu

Each day, satellites, drones, applications, and GPS devices generate petabytes of spatial data that can be used to solve real-world problems. But the majority of this data is stuck in siloed legacy systems or sits idle and disjointed. We see the potential this data can have for business, the planet, government, and societies. And we’re on a mission to help companies fully utilize it so they can tackle issues like how to manage their fleets of vessels and vehicles, where and how to build infrastructure, and determine the best methods to assess and mitigate risk of catastrophic natural disasters.

To achieve our mission, we’re partnering with leading investors in the technology space and have raised $21.5M in Series A funding—led by Felicis, with continued support from Wing Venture Capital and Clear Ventures and participation from JetBlue Ventures and P7 Ventures. Aydin Senkut, Founder and Managing Partner at Felicis will also be joining Wherobots’ Board of Directors together with Peter Wagner from Wing Venture Capital. We are committed to constantly improving our technology to process and analyze geospatial data faster and more efficiently and this funding will accelerate our product development and go-to-market operations.

From Research to Market

Growing up in Egypt, Mo saw the impact of climate change first-hand. Rising temperatures and pollution are threatening the air quality and water supply of millions of Egyptians. These challenges, among others, are not isolated—they reflect global issues as our world changes faster than ever. Motivated by these realities, we set out to harness data that captures what’s happening in the physical world to drive innovation and empower people to tackle both large-scale and localized problems. We met when Mo was a professor and Jia was finishing his PhD at ASU. We bonded over our shared passion for geospatial data and its untapped use cases. We realized the popular data warehousing and analytics solutions available were built from the ground up to process internet data, not geospatial data. When geospatial data is forced into these systems, they underperform, lack essential features for intuitive geospatial analysis, and are often either closed-source or reliant on outdated architectures. These limitations make geospatial solutions inaccessible for most organizations. Recognizing this gap, we set out to create a solution tailored to the unique challenges of geospatial data, unlocking its power for organizations of all sizes.

Apache Sedona — an open-source geospatial compute framework — was our first response to this issue. Today Apache Sedona has over 40M downloads and is now used to run planetary-scale workloads by companies like Amazon.com for last mile delivery and Land O’ Lakes for precision agriculture. After years of growing Apache Sedona, we saw a tremendous appetite for a more in-depth enterprise solution. Enter Wherobots, a fully managed, scalable cloud platform that is purpose-built to make geospatial solutions easy to create while maintaining compatibility with Apache Sedona. Wherobots also integrates well with the modern data and AI ecosystem, making it a plug-n-play option for Fortune 1000 companies to derive value from the geospatial data they collect.

Putting Data to Work

Wherobots’ Spatial Intelligence Cloud empowers businesses to unlock planetary-scale solutions and put their spatial data to work. Data teams are able to solve problems faster and more efficiently on a compute engine that’s optimized for spatial analytics, a broad set of functions in SQL, Python, and Java, with a variety of native geospatially specific functions, as well as the ability for customers to bring in their own AI and ML models to drive insight from the physical world. This makes Wherobots a far more productive system for data teams to get their work done without switching contexts. Using Wherobots, industries across financial services & insurance, transportation, logistics & supply chain, energy, agriculture, and social services can analyze real-world issues up to 20x faster at a planetary-scale. This means more informed, faster decision making around areas like last mile delivery, infrastructure, mobility, and agriculture.

Our Community and Partners

Industries need to stay ahead of an evolving planet as the climate changes, natural disasters become more prevalent, the rate in which people migrate increases, geopolitical issues become more common, and interconnected systems continue to evolve. These shifts can raise both macro and micro level challenges around everything from where to focus a businesses’ operations and infrastructure to where consumer demand is moving. Wherobots activates the data businesses already have available by making their geospatial context more complete and precise, allowing them to scale and plot an intelligent and adaptable course forward.

We’re bringing this to life working with organizations like The Overture Maps Foundation, a coalition of industry leaders including Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, and TomTom, to support its global mapping initiatives, Addresscloud, to help insurers understand geographic risk, and GeoPostcodes, to support analytics for its global postal and population database.

Here’s what they have to say:

“Overture produces a building dataset covering all buildings in the world, with 2.3B geometries and growing, that’s updated frequently. There’s a lot of data, and compute that goes into producing it and keeping it up to date,” said Jennings Anderson, Geoscientist at Overture and Data Engineer at Meta. “We accelerated the pipelines that produce the buildings dataset by up to 20x after we moved them to Wherobots, which required a simple redirection of our code. We retained compatibility with Apache Sedona, and the move put us into a development experience that’s made us more productive.”

“Our high quality data results from aggregating reliable raster population data with our curated boundaries vector database,” said Jerome Urbain, Head of Products at GeoPostcodes. “With Wherobots Spatial SQL, we’re able to analyze population data more efficiently and more accurately, reducing processing time from 39 days to less than one day, and deliver it to our customers across the globe in a far more timely manner. Not only was this a massive speed increase, the overall impact to our data team is they are able to work far more efficiently and productively, answering questions for our customers faster and helping to grow our business.”

“Wherobots has given us the potential to run jobs that used to take hours or days to minutes and removed the need to think about provisioning compute. As we provide perils information (flood, fire, etc) to insurers at the property level, we particularly appreciate the ability to be able to run combined vector/raster analysis, without having to previously transform the raster data into vector format or some other format,” said John Powell, Senior Geospatial Data Engineer at Addresscloud.

“From a developer perspective, having data, algorithms and compute (and to be presented with a Spark/Sedona context in a Jupyter notebook on startup) combined in one platform is extremely powerful, comparable in many respects to Google Earth Engine, but with much greater guarantees of, and control over, job completion.”

AWS Marketplace Integration

We’re researchers at heart and we understand that there are so many undiscovered use cases for geospatial data—our customers are the ones helping expand and retool the industry. We’re excited to reach even more teams through our availability on the AWS marketplace, allowing customers to leverage their AWS committed spend and benefit from integrated billing. We’ll be at AWS re:Invent in December (next week!) to learn what else geospatial data can take on. If you are coming to re:Invent, sign up for our GeoParty on the 4th of December, or check out our lightning talk at 12:30 on Thursday. Additionally, the Amazon Last Mile team will be showcasing how they utilize Apache Sedona at the Open Source Developer Theater. For a full overview of everything we have going on at re:Invent, checkout our overview page.

What’s Next

When we first started the groundwork for Wherobots, we were shocked at the disconnect between the vast amount of planetary data available and cloud data infrastructure support. Through this new round of funding, we hope to provide companies with the tools to really see the world we live in, adapt to new challenges, create intelligence, and potentially save lives.

We hope you follow along for our next chapter and if this sounds like something you want to be a part of—we’re always looking for great talent.

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