As a kid in Cairo, Mo Sarwat first grasped the dangers of not understanding the natural world. It was 1992, and the city and much of northeastern Egypt were devastated by an earthquake.
If you, like me, live in California, you’re used to the occasional shake, where you watch your glass of water shimmy and then go about your day. But this wasn’t a fleeting inconvenience: It was a nightmare scenario. In Cairo, Sarwat watched as an earthquake devastated the city—more than 500 people died in the catastrophic aftermath, while tens of thousands were injured and lost their homes. Subsequent estimates have placed the earthquake’s damages at about $1 billion.
"It was a massive disaster,” said Sarwat. “It made me ask: Can you predict or forecast these kinds of events? Then after the fact, what does the power of data look like? It’s not only about the earthquake data, but data about the buildings, about whatever is on the map about people and their means.”
Today, Sarwat is the cofounder and CEO of Wherobots, a cloud-based platform that processes and analyzes massive geospatial data from sources like satellites, GPS devices, and drones. It’s a lot of distance traveled for Sarwat, who was previously a longtime professor at Arizona State University and a creator of the open-source spatial computing engine Apache Sedona.
And there’s still plenty of ground to cover, literally and figuratively. Wherobots has closed its $21.5 million Series A, Fortune can exclusively report. Felicis led the round, with participation from existing investors Wing VC and Clear Ventures and new investors JetBlue Ventures and P7 Ventures. The startup’s platform is used in a wide range of industries, helping with things like insurance risk assessment and environmental compliance. The company this week has also joined the Amazon Web Services marketplace and is thinking about partnerships, as it sees its role in helping companies address climate change as key.
"What really makes Wherobots special isn’t necessarily putting things on the map,” said Sarwat. “You see flood maps every day, and they’re up after the fact. It’s about bringing in tons of historical data about all these floods. These are massive datasets.”
By incorporating what Sarwat says can amount to tens, or hundreds of millions of historical data points about an area’s buildings and infrastructure and the economic impact from past events like floods and hurricanes, maps can become incredibly valuable tools for disaster preparedness and response.
Investors in Wherobots are betting the company can capitalize on the current explosion in geospatial data. Buried in Databricks’ State of Data + AI Report from this year, geospatial data appears as the second-largest and second-fastest growing category for AI and machine learning applications. Meanwhile, other data points out there include NASA’s ballooning volume of Earth observation data and all the location-centric data that apps like Lyft are constantly processing. In short, there’s more data about the world around us than there’s ever been, and someone has to process it and help companies make sense of it.
“Just because the data is there and the potential is there, it doesn’t mean that it can readily be harnessed and managed,” said Aydin Senkut, Felicis founder and managing partner. “It’s not that easy. It’s actually very complex because data is in a completely different form.”
Senkut’s bet is that, as Wherobots tackles the explosion of geospatial data that existing systems aren’t designed to handle, the company will become the geospatial data market’s major platform—entrenched in the way Databricks, MongoDB, and Confluent have become to their respective markets. The bull case for Wherobots, in some sense, is simple: If the company can, like Databricks or Confluent, figure out “how to help customers derive more value from their data,” Peter Wagner, Wing VC founding partner, said via email.
Wherobots’ customers include The Overture Maps Foundation and GeoPostcodes, but there are bigger fish who are already users of Apache Sedona: Nvidia, BMW, Allstate, SwissRe, and Land O’Lakes. (Apache Sedona can be used with Wherobots and is closing in on 40 million downloads, the company says.) Sarwat is particularly aware of the company’s ability to help companies adjust to climate change, especially as extreme weather events grow increasingly frequent and severe.
"If you understand the granularity and impact of these natural disasters—and the environment generally—it doesn't have to be a disaster,” said Sarwat.
See you tomorrow,
Allie Garfinkle
Twitter: @agarfinks
Email: alexandra.garfinkle@fortune.com
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