Wherobots Raises $21.5M in Series A Funding Led by Felicis to Modernize Geospatial and Climate Intelligence, Starting in the AWS Cloud
Overture Maps Foundation and others utilize Wherobots to bring geospatial products to market faster, while accelerating their workloads by up to 20x in the cloud
Wherobots, the Spatial Intelligence Cloud, built by the original creators of Apache Sedona, Mo Sarwat and Jia Yu, today 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.
"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."
Amazon Last Mile Delivery optimizes delivery planning and navigation using Apache Sedona within their map automation pipelines.
"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," said Arka Pratim Das, Sr. Manager, Software Development, Amazon Maps. "Sedona's scalable spatial joins, partitioning, and support for complex geometric operations are critical to automating updates for Amazon Last Mile's delivery networks."
Wherobots is rapidly gaining traction among leading organizations. The Overture Maps Foundation, a coalition of industry leaders including Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, and TomTom, use Apache Sedona and Wherobots Cloud to support its global mapping initiatives.
"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," said Marc Prioleau, Executive Director at Overture Maps Foundation. "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."
In addition to 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, allowing 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 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.
Wherobots is the Spatial Intelligence Cloud that unlocks planetary-scale answers from geospatial data. It enables high performance geospatial ETL, analytics, and computer vision at planetary-scale with a modern data lakehouse architecture. Developed by the original creators of Apache Sedona, Wherobots empowers data teams to utilize spatial data up to 20x faster at a fraction of the cost of alternative cloud services when used for geospatial analytics and computer vision. For more information, visit www.wherobots.com.