Cloud-native spatial analytics and artificial intelligence startup Wherobots Inc. announced today that it has raised $21.5 million in new funding to accelerate the delivery of modern solutions that close the intelligence gap between our physical and digital worlds.

The company was founded in 2022 by the founders of Apache Sedona, an open-source geospatial computing solution for Apache Spark and Apache Flink. It offers what it calls the Spatial Intelligence Cloud, a service that enables organizations to process and analyze geospatial data at planetary scale. The idea is to handle and extract insights from vast amounts of location-based data collected globally and efficiently regardless of the data’s size or complexity, with the goal of allowing businesses to unlock actionable intelligence.

Wherobots argues that despite billions of satellites, sensors and GPS-enabled devices producing petabytes of spatial data, organizations are not putting this data to work. Spatial data can be difficult to analyze, since modern analytics solutions have been primarily designed to analyze internet data, not spatial data. When teams use existing solutions for geospatial analytics, they often discover they are sluggish, don’t have the right features, create vendor lock-in, can’t scale with their needs, or are prohibitively expensive.

Wherobots address the issues in relation to dealing with spatial data by allowing companies to run spatial data workloads up to 20 times faster than modern cloud-based analytics engines. The result accelerates the realization of ideas, boosting productivity and lowering costs.

“Our mission is to make it easy for our customers to utilize geospatial data,” said Chief Executive Mo Sarwat. “By deploying Wherobots on their spatial data, companies are bringing products to market faster, they’re calculating risk and reward with higher accuracy, and are making better decisions for their operations at scale.”

Wherobots provides serverless, planetary-scale geospatial data solutions designed for extract, transform and load pipelines, analytics and computer vision on satellite imagery, among other use cases. The platform simplifies solution development with support for both vector and raster data types, accessible through programming languages including SQL, Python and Java/Scala.

Industries such as insurance, environmental management, transportation, logistics, supply chain and agriculture can leverage Wherobots and Apache Sedona to process spatial data more efficiently. Doing so allows organizations to answer critical questions faster, driving innovation and improving decision-making across various sectors, the company says.

Felicis Ventures led the Series A round, with Wing Venture Capital, Clear Ventures, JetBlue Ventures and P7 Ventures also participating. The funding will accelerate Wherobots’ product development and go-to-market to help organizations realize the full potential of geospatial data in the cloud.

Image: Wherobots