Wherobots, a Spatial Intelligence Cloud company built by the original creators of Apache Sedona Mo Sarwat and Jia Yu, announced the closing of a $21.5 million Series A funding round to accelerate the delivery of modern solutions that close the intelligence gap between our physical and digital worlds. Felicis led the funding round, which also received continued support from Wing Venture Capital and Clear Ventures and participation from JetBlue Ventures and P7 Ventures.
This funding round will accelerate Wherobots’ product development and go-to-market to help organizations realize the full potential of geospatial data in the cloud. Along with the funding, Aydin Senkut, Founder and Managing Partner at Felicis, will join Wherobots’ Board of Directors along with Peter Wagner from Wing Venture Capital.
Billions of satellites, drones, sensors, and GPS-enabled devices produce petabytes of spatial data daily that describe what’s happening. However, as a whole, organizations are not putting this data to work. Spatial data is challenging 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 and incomplete, create vendor lock, and cannot scale with their needs. This stifles ideas that would otherwise make advancements in business, science, government, and Earth’s climate.
Wherobots enables companies to run spatial data workloads up to 20 times 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. And Ssolution 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 can utilize spatial data to answer critical questions faster.
Wherobots’ founders had 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. And 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% year-over-year with nearly 40 million downloads.
Along with these industry-leading customer applications, Wherobots is proud to announce its readiness to support production workloads on AWS with its availability on the AWS marketplace. This will enable customers to leverage their AWS committed spend and benefit from integrated billing. For teams participating at AWS Re:Invent, Wherobots will collaborate with AWS to deliver a presence in the pavilion and in presentations at the event.
Wherobots and Apache Sedona are used by thousands of enterprises such as 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.
KEY QUOTES;
“Our mission is to make it easy for our customers to utilize geospatial data. 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.”
– Mo Sarwat, CEO of Wherobots
“Geospatial data is a trillion dollar market in the making. 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.”
– Aydin Senkut, Founder and Managing Partner of Felicis
“Apache Sedona is a key part of our high-precision map conflation process, enabling us to process millions of fleet-derived traffic signs and enhance our maps for routing and planning. Sedona’s scalable spatial joins, partitioning, and support for complex geometric operations are critical to automating updates for Amazon Last Mile’s delivery networks.”
– Arka Pratim Das, Sr. Manager, Software Development, Amazon Maps
“We are very pleased to have Wherobots as a member of Overture. Their expertise in geospatial intelligence helps advance our goal of creating an open, interoperable map of the world. Wherobots’ interoperability with Apache Sedona helps us to process and analyze geospatial data with their cloud service at speed and scale, helping to push the boundaries of what is possible in global mapping.”
– Marc Prioleau, Executive Director at Overture Maps Foundation
