SAN FRANCISCO — Wherobots, the Spatial Intelligence Cloud, built by the original creators of Apache Sedona, Mo Sarwat and Jia Yu, announced the closing of a $21.5M Series A funding round to accelerate the delivery of modern solutions that close the intelligence gap between our physical and digital worlds. The round was led by Felicis, with continued support from Wing Venture Capital and Clear Ventures and participation from JetBlue Ventures and P7 Ventures. This funding will accelerate Wherobots’ product development and go-to-market to help organizations realize the full potential of geospatial data in the cloud. Alongside the funding round, Aydin Senkut, Founder and Managing Partner at Felicis, will be joining Wherobots’ Board of Directors together with Peter Wagner from Wing Venture Capital.
Daily, billions of satellites, drones, sensors, and GPS enabled devices produce petabytes of spatial data that describe what’s happening in business, in societies, and on Earth. But as a whole, organizations aren’t putting this data to work. Spatial data is difficult to analyze because modern analytics solutions were built to analyze internet data, not spatial data. When teams use these solutions for geospatial analytics they discover they are sluggish, feature incomplete, create vendor-lock, can’t scale with their needs, or they are prohibitively expensive. All of which stifle ideas and innovation that would otherwise make advancements in business, science, government, and for Earth’s climate.
Wherobots enables companies to run spatial data workloads up to 20x faster than modern cloud-based analytics engines, accelerating the realization of ideas, boosting productivity, and lowering cost. Wherobots is serverless, and offers complete, planetary-scale geospatial data solutions for ETL pipelines, analytics, computer vision on satellite imagery, and more. Solution development in Wherobots is easy with its unified support across vector and raster data types, accessible through SQL, Python, and Java/Scala programming languages. With Wherobots and Apache Sedona, the insurance, environmental, transportation, logistics, supply chain, agriculture, and other industries are more capable of utilizing spatial data to bring answers to critical questions faster.
Wherobots and Apache Sedona are used by thousands of enterprises including NVIDIA, Mercedes Benz, BMW, Ford, Maersk, Allstate, SwissRe, J.B. Hunt, Uber, Bosch, Land O’Lakes, Foursquare and many others. The company remains committed to helping organizations realize the full potential of spatial intelligence in the cloud.
“Our mission is to make it easy for our customers to utilize geospatial data,” said Mo Sarwat, CEO of Wherobots. “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. This funding round will accelerate the delivery of capabilities that increase the utility of Apache Sedona and Wherobots, and expand the customers and use cases that Wherobots supports.”
Wherobots founders incubated Apache Sedona, an open source, planetary-scale geospatial computing solution for Apache Spark, Apache Flink, and others, as a first yet significant advancement to mine the full potential of spatial data. Apache Sedona is compatible with Wherobots, and is now the default open source geospatial engine utilized by small to large organizations, such as Amazon.com for last mile delivery, as well as Land O’Lakes for precision farming operations, and is growing 150% YoY with nearly 40M downloads.
“Geospatial data is a trillion dollar market in the making,” said Aydin Senkut, Founder and Managing Partner of Felicis. “Wherobots is making spatial data more valuable by democratizing purpose-built solutions that extract insights at an industry leading pace. Their vision of building a Spatial Intelligence Cloud is a bold step towards unifying geospatial data in cloud-native environments. Mo and Jia assembled an incredible team to build on their pioneering work with Apache Sedona; it’s a company full of 10x talent.”
