- CARTO — a cloud-native spatial analysis platform — recently announced the closure of a $61 million Series C round. These are the details.
CARTO — a cloud-native spatial analysis platform — recently announced the closure of a $61 million Series C round led by New York-based global venture capital and private equity firm Insight Partners with participation from the European Investment Fund, as well as existing investors Accel, Salesforce Ventures, Hearst Ventures, Earlybird and Kibo.
Spatial analytics helps organizations to not only understand where things happen but why they happen. And traditionally, this type of analytics was carried out by specialized analysts in the GIS industry, but with CARTO’s location intelligence platform, access to this technology is now democratized by enabling a spatial analysis on cloud data warehouses using a structured query language (SQL). This latest funding round will be used to further accelerate these cloud integrations, enabling the New York-based company to continue its rapid growth in verticals such as consumer packaged goods (CPG), retail, logistics, telecoms, etc.
Trusted by market leaders such as JLL, Mastercard, and T-Mobile, CARTO has long led the charge in enabling analysts to use SQL for spatial use cases. And now with many organizations moving to the cloud, CARTO enables an end-to-end analytics workflow on location data, directly on top of the major cloud data warehouses.
With support for Google BigQuery, Snowflake, Amazon Redshift, Databricks, and PostgreSQL systems, CARTO provides a full cloud-native approach to spatial analytics versus legacy GIS systems. This results in a more scalable and cost-effective solution to working with spatial data, and adds an unrivaled level of interoperability, through Spatial SQL.
With over 150 employees spread across the US and Europe, the company has seen rapid growth in recent years, scaling existing partnerships (alongside giants such as Google Cloud) to enable organizations like Telus, Decathlon, and Coca-Cola to accelerate the modernization of their geospatial stacks.
Along with new investors, CARTO will bring a new range of advantages to organizations wanting to start or continue their journey in modern spatial analytics – reaping the benefits of reduced computing costs and improved scalability.
KEY QUOTES:
“The rise of the data warehouse has allowed organizations to unify and connect all their data in a single location, and geospatial data is no exception. Now, thanks to our cloud native offering, they can also perform spatial analytics on top of them. Our Spatial Extension runs on top of all the major data warehouses and takes full advantage of all their benefits, giving our users a complete suite for geospatial analysis that is highly performant, scalable and secure. And because Spatial SQL uses all the same elements and structure of regular SQL, it is compatible with all modern analytics stacks. Whether it is site selection for brick & mortar, route optimization in logistics or customer segmentation in CPG – more and more businesses want to understand not only where things are happening, but also why they are happening there – and that’s what CARTO enables.”
— Luis Sanz, CEO of CARTO
“What CARTO brings to the market is a category-defining cloud-native spatial data analytics solution. The platform’s ability to provide actionable insights from data warehouses is helping CARTO pioneer a major frontier in geospatial analysis. Insight is thrilled to partner with Luis, Javier, and the tremendous team at CARTO on this exciting next chapter in the company’s growth journey.”
— George Mathew, Managing Director at Insight Partners
