2023 has been an exceptional year for Wherobots, marked by a series of significant milestones. In Q3, we proudly announced a $5.5 million seed funding round, setting a strong financial foundation for our future endeavors. Our team experienced a remarkable 300% growth compared to the previous year, a testament to our expanding capabilities and reach. In Q4, we achieved a major milestone with the launch of our commercial product, marking our entry into a new phase of business operations. Additionally, the Apache Sedona project, a cornerstone of our technology, saw an impressive 130% YoY growth in the number of downloads, reflecting the vibrant and growing community engagement around our platform. Below is a summary of what we achieved on each front:

Growing the Team

The most remarkable achievement for Wherobots in 2023 was its extraordinary team expansion, which saw an impressive 300% growth rate. This expansion significantly enhanced various key areas, including the executive leadership, engineering, marketing, and developer relations teams. To highlight a few notable instances:

Maxime Petazzoni has been a standout addition to the executive leadership team, assuming the role of Head of Engineering. Prior to joining Wherobots, Maxime made significant contributions at SignalFx and Splunk, where he led multiple engineering organizations with notable success. William Lyon is another high-caliber professional who recently joined Wherobots, spearheading our developer relations efforts. William’s experience at Neo4j in a similar role was instrumental in fostering the growth and widespread adoption of Neo4j’s technologies.

We have strategically expanded our engineering team by bringing on board specialists in key areas such as spatial technology, database engineering, cloud data infrastructure, and artificial intelligence. The team’s expertise is enriched by their previous experience with leading industry giants. Our team members boast impressive pedigrees, having previously been part of renowned organizations like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Apple, Splunk, LinkedIn, Airbnb, Grab, Tencent, among others. This diverse array of top-tier industry experience positions us uniquely in the tech landscape and underscores our commitment to excellence in our field.

Please watch the following video to learn about our team and culture:
https://youtu.be/sSR-jheAPwM?si=_GYHvRmH4tpR_MFY

Commercial Product Launch

In the final quarter of 2023, Wherobots achieved a significant milestone with the launch of its commercial offering: a cutting-edge cloud data infrastructure. This innovative platform empowers organizations to leverage Spatial Analytics and AI for extracting valuable insights from their data. The centerpiece of this product is Wherobots Cloud, featuring SedonaDB as a fully-managed cloud service, grounded in the robust architecture of Apache Sedona. SedonaDB is designed for high scalability and cost efficiency, enabling users to conduct advanced spatial analytics on enterprise data of any scale and regardless of its location – be it in a data lake, data warehouse, or a conventional database.

Since its recent launch just a few weeks ago, Wherobots has witnessed a remarkable uptake of its product, evidenced by many users signing up. This early success is further underscored by the processing of more than 3 billion spatial records, a testament to the platform’s robust capability. Additionally, the platform has been utilized to process more than 2000 spatial analytics tasks, indicating a strong and growing demand for its innovative solutions. That is only scratching the surface since Wherobots is designed to handle hundreds of petabytes and millions of spatial analytics tasks on a more regular basis.

Check the product launch details here: https://wherobots.com/sedonadb-the-cloud-native-spatial-analytics-database-platform/

Raising $5.5M in Seed

In a significant financial milestone achieved in 2023, Wherobots proudly disclosed the successful acquisition of $5.5 million in funding through an initial seed investment round. This round saw active participation from influential industry figures, including Chris Rust and Peter Wagner, founding partners of Clear Ventures and Wing VC respectively. Both Rust and Wagner have taken on roles within the Wherobots board, marking a notable collaboration.

Check the funding announcement article on TechCrunch here: https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/13/wherobots-is-building-a-data-platform-to-treat-spatial-data-as-a-first-class-citizen/

Apache Sedona Growth

Over the past year, Apache Sedona has experienced remarkable growth. As of today, it boasts support for over a hundred spatial data processing functions through its distributed and optimized spatial SQL engine. This advancement has paralleled significant growth in the Wherobots community in 2023. A notable indicator of this growth is the surge in Sedona downloads, which recorded a 130% year-over-year increase compared to 2022. This surge has brought the total number of Apache Sedona downloads to an impressive 23 million, according to PyPI and Maven Central statistics. Additionally, the Apache Sedona contributor base expanded to 111, marking approximately 20% growth from the previous year. A striking testament to this vibrant community’s engagement is the nearly 1 million lines of code contributed to Sedona, a staggering 1500% increase in year-over-year growth compared to 2022.

Check Apache Sedona Github Repo Here: https://github.com/apache/sedona

Finally

As we reflect on the tremendous growth we experienced in 2023, we’re filled with enthusiasm for the year ahead. In 2024, we are not only expecting to see further team expansion and product adoption but also setting our sights on several ambitious corporate goals. We aim to enhance our technological capabilities, foster innovation in spatial analytics, and strengthen our market position through strategic partnerships and collaborations. Additionally, we’re committed to delivering even greater value to our customers, achieving new milestones in user satisfaction, and driving sustainable growth. On behalf of the entire Wherobots team, we extend our warmest wishes for a joyful holiday season and a prosperous New Year. Here’s to a 2024 filled with achievement, innovation, and success!