Wherobots helps customers make sense of all the data from satellites, drones, GPS services, and more. Pulse 2.0 interviewed Wherobots co-founder and CEO Mo Sarwat to learn more about the company.
Mo Sarwat’s Background
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Could you tell me more about your background? Sarwat said:
“I grew up in Egypt and moved to the US on a wrestling scholarship for college. I later pursued my graduate studies in computer science at the University of Minnesota. During this time, I became passionate about leveraging my evolving expertise to tackle issues at the intersection of business, technology, and our planet.”
“I became a professor at Arizona State University and met my co-founder, Jia Yu, during his Ph.D. studies. Together, Jia and I built the first version of Apache Sedona, a widely used open-source software solution for enabling geospatial analytics.”
“With over a decade of computer science research experience in both academia and industry, my work focuses on developing robust and scalable data systems for spatial and spatiotemporal applications. As CEO and co-founder of Wherobots, I lead our mission to develop the “Spatial Intelligence Cloud,” empowering companies across industries–such as insurance, climate tech, finance,transportation, logistics & supply chain, energy, and agriculture–to make sense of geospatial data gathered from sources such as satellites, connected cars, and drones.”
Formation Of The Company
How did the idea for the company come together? Sarwat shared:
“The idea of Wherobots came after years of growing and refining Apache Sedona. Jia and I recognized a clear demand in the industry for a more robust enterprise solution that enabled companies to process, analyze, and make sense of their geospatial data quickly and in a way that worked natively with modern data lake environments. That realization led to Wherobots: a fully managed, cloud-native platform built on the same APIs as Apache Sedona, designed to unlock answers to planetary scale geospatial questions that are either very challenging or impossible to answer today.”
Core Products
What are Wherobots’ core products and features? Sarwat explained:
“The Wherobots’ Spatial Intelligence Cloud enables data teams to create solutions with geospatial data faster and more efficiently. Companies across a range of industries, including insurance, environment, transportation, logistics, supply chain, and agriculture, can leverage spatial data to bring answers to critical questions faster.
We have four core products at Wherobots:
– Wherobots Spatial Intelligence Cloud: a fully managed, serverless cloud currently available on AWS that enables organizations to create spatial intelligence with their data in cloud storage buckets.
– WherobotsDB: a purpose-built compute engine for geospatial analytics and AI. WherobotsDB performs geospatial data operations up to 20x faster than alternatives found in the cloud.
– WherobotsAI: WherobotsAI provides prebuilt ML and computer vision capabilities designed to accelerate insight creation from GPS and satellite imagery.
– Wherobots Spatial Catalog: The catalog allows teams to discover spatial assets they have created across storage repositories, ensuring they remain both accessible and controlled. Wherobots also stocks the catalog with open datasets and computer vision models to help customers get started.”
Challenges Faced
Have you faced any challenges in your work sector recently? Sarwat acknowledged:
“There is a common phrase that we hear in the geospatial data industry that we are seeking to eradicate – ‘geospatial (data) is special.’ This implies that both geospatial data and its data processing tools are ‘hard to utilize.'”
“We are debunking this belief by delivering cloud-native solutions purpose built for processing and creating value from geospatial data. This starts with WherobotsDB, which we’ve optimized for processing geospatial data at a small to planetary scale. It also makes solution development significantly more productive than alternatives because customers have all the necessary features to build, and can work with various geospatial data types in a single place.”
“Creating change in any industry is always challenging, but it’s a challenge we are betting our company on and we’re confident in our ability to make it happen. Our industry peers are already asking for geospatial data to be treated with the same degree of capabilities across the open data lakehouse ecosystem, alongside traditional tabular and computer generated data formats. The success of Apache Sedona shows that there has been a great deal of appetite for this change.”
Evolution Of The Company’s Technology
How has the company’s technology evolved since its launch? Sarwat noted:
“We are continuously evolving our technology to meet the dynamic needs of our customers and drive innovation across sectors. With our latest advancement, WherobotsAI Raster Inference, we’ve further demonstrated our dedication to providing cutting-edge capabilities that unleash new opportunities to utilize geospatial data by making far easier and more cost-effective to run computer vision models scale on aerial / satellite imagery.”
Significant Milestones
What have been some of the company’s most significant milestones? Sarwat cited:
“Although I’m incredibly proud of many of our accomplishments, one of Wherobots’ most significant milestones has been our recent availability on AWS Marketplace, and our presence at AWS re:Invent this year in tandem with that announcement. This partnership allows AWS customers to leverage their AWS committed spend and benefit from integrated billing.”
“AWS S3 is arguably the largest data lake on the planet, and we now have an easy to use, secure integration with it. There are massive amounts of geospatial data on AWS in open data catalogs, as well as in private organization buckets that are in need of a better solution to unlock its value.”
Customer Success Stories
Can you share any specific customer success stories? Sarwat highlighted:
“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.”
“For specific examples, The Overture Maps Foundation, a coalition of industry leaders including Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, and TomTom, uses Apache Sedona and Wherobots Cloud to support its global mapping initiatives. Additionally AddressCloud, a UK based SaaS company, uses Wherobots to process property data to better enable insurers to understand and manage the risk of climate related events to their portfolio.”
Funding
When asking Sarwat about the company’s funding details, he revealed:
“In November 2024, Wherobots closed a $21.5M Series A funding round, 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 our product development and go-to-market, ensuring we can help organizations realize the full potential of geospatial data in the cloud. This funding comes on the heels of our $5.5M seed round last year.”
Total Addressable Market
What total addressable market (TAM) size is the company pursuing? Sarwat assessed:
“As of 2022, the global geospatial market was estimated around $452 billion of which 39% is related to data processing, AI, and ML, with projections to reach a significant $1.4 trillion by 2030. 14% of this market today is estimated to be for ‘data cubes’ for delivering ‘analysis ready data’ and 4% of this market is for AI/ML specifically.”
What differentiates the company from its competition? Sarwat affirmed:
“When it comes to innovation and excellence, Wherobots leads with:
– Speed and Scalability: We’re up to 20X faster and far more cost effective than any other processing engine for geospatial data at large scale.
– Developer Productivity: We put comprehensive capabilities at the fingertips of developers. There are capabilities for both vector and raster data, including over 90 raster and 190 vector functions, map matching, geostatistics, map tiling, GeoAI (raster inference), and more available out of the box.
– Apache Sedona Compatibility: WherobotsDB is 100% compatible with the open source Apache Sedona project, so you can easily shift into WherobotsDB or back to running Apache Sedona elsewhere if you need to.
– Serverless, Cloud Native, Pay-as-you-go: Customers don’t need to worry about managing cloud resources, they just spin up a notebook or a job and our cloud takes care of the rest. You only pay a low on-demand rate for the resources you use.
Future Company Goals
What are some of the future company goals? Sarwat pointed out:
“At Wherobots, we are dedicated to helping organizations realize the full potential of geospatial data, and make geospatial data easy to utilize. This means we’ll need to expand our geographic, cloud, and feature coverage to meet customers’ needs where they are, ensuring access to the solutions necessary to drive meaningful impact, foster innovation, and potentially save lives.”
Additional Thoughts
Any other topics you would like to discuss? Sarwat concluded:
“We believe the best way to help data teams and organizations adapt to our changing planet is not by asking them to dramatically alter how they do things. Instead, we focus on providing the tools they need to understand the evolving dynamics of our planet and population – integrating seamlessly into the workflows they already use today.”
“We know that by enabling this and transforming the economics of answering large-scale spatial data questions, we’re empowering organizations to explore the physical world and their interests within it more effectively. This enables them to make better strategic decisions faster and more efficiently than ever before.”
