geospatial-data
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Esri UK puts the map to work
A sewer maintenance programme reported £1 million in savings. Heathrow is connecting information on half a million assets. Esri UK’s business begins where the pretty map ends.
Geoff Michener Built a Business From the Places the Internet Forgot
He went looking for a cleaner database and found an untidy world. Dataplor's founder turned that mess into a global location-intelligence company by pairing machines with people who still bother to check.
Dave Drazen Put the Internet on the Map
For 25 years, the GeoTel founder has turned buried fiber, rooftop towers and lit buildings into something decision-makers can actually see - and use.
Suzanne Serwatuk Knows the Most Technical Product Still Needs a Human Story
From a provocative ice-cream shop to the C-suite of a geospatial software company, Serwatuk has built a career around the same practical question: how do you make people care?
Teranet's $700 Million Lesson: The Boring Software Behind 10 Million Property Transactions a Year
Ontario set out to turn filing cabinets into infrastructure. The conversion ran years late and its estimate climbed past C$700 million - but the system that emerged now sits beneath millions of property transactions, lender decisions and legal searches.
Safe Software Built a $100 Million Business Translating the Data Nobody Else Wanted to Touch
FME began as a translator for stubborn map files. Three decades later, Safe Software is betting that the same obsession with interoperability can make enterprise data - and the AI consuming it - behave.
Dataplor Turned Dirty Maps Into a Global Data Business - Now 370 Million Places Can Answer Back
Geoff Michener began with people checking small businesses in Mexico. A decade later, Dataplor sells global place and foot-traffic intelligence - and its most useful lesson is the pivot from custom fieldwork to a data subscription that gets more valuable every time the real world changes.
Whirrx Learned the Hard Part of Drone Surveying Isn’t Flying - It’s Earning the Engineer’s Trust
The Cedar Rapids company stopped selling the magic of flight and started selling what happens after landing: checked data, usable files and accuracy a surveyor can defend.
The Map That Knows Who Owns the Dirt
onX began with a Montana hunter loading property lines onto a GPS chip. It now sells millions of subscribers something more valuable than a pin on a screen: confidence about where they can go, what they will find and how to get back.
Near Space Labs
Near Space Labs is a Brooklyn-based earth-imaging company that flies small autonomous robots called Swift into the stratosphere on helium balloons to capture 7-centimeter-resolution imagery of the ground below. Founded in 2017, it delivers frequent, analysis-ready aerial data to property and casualty insurers, governments, utilities and environmental groups at a fraction of the cost of traditional planes or satellites, positioning balloon-borne imaging as a scalable, low-emission alternative for monitoring cities, infrastructure and disasters.
Foursquare
Foursquare is a geospatial technology company that turns the physical world into structured, privacy-minded location data. Once known for the check-in app that helped popularize mobile location sharing, the company reinvented itself as an independent location-intelligence platform. Its products - Places, Movement SDK, Studio, and the Graph - supply a database of 120+ million points of interest and movement signals that power maps, marketing, analytics, and app features for companies including Apple, Uber, Snapchat, and Spotify.
Station A
Station A is a San Francisco climate-tech company that runs a software marketplace for buying and selling clean energy. Its platform turns a building's address into a data-driven estimate of the financial return on solar, battery storage, and EV charging, then lets commercial real estate owners list projects and collect competitive bids from a network of thousands of vetted energy developers. Spun out of NRG Energy in 2018 by a team that met at MIT, Station A aims to make clean energy transactions as simple and transparent as an online marketplace, and counts large owners like Prologis, Walmart, CBRE, Nestle, and Goldman Sachs among its users.
PolicyMap
PolicyMap is a Philadelphia-based cloud mapping and data analytics platform that lets anyone build custom maps, reports, and dashboards from more than 75,000 curated indicators drawn from 170-plus public and proprietary sources - no GIS expertise required. Spun out of the Reinvestment Fund, it serves banks, universities, hospitals, governments, and nonprofits that need to turn place-based data into decisions about housing, health, lending, and community investment.
Maggie McCullough
Maggie McCullough is the CEO and founder of PolicyMap, the Philadelphia-based mapping and data-visualization platform she launched in 2008. A former White House budget-office staffer turned housing researcher, she built PolicyMap after struggling to fit maps and data into her own policy work, betting that anyone should be able to make a map as easily as they shop online. The platform now serves universities, banks, health systems, nonprofits and governments, layering thousands of public and proprietary datasets into one searchable map. In December 2023 the company closed a $3 million Series A led by its former parent, the Reinvestment Fund.
Placer.ai
Placer.ai is a location intelligence platform that turns anonymized mobile-device signals into foot-traffic, trade-area, and audience analytics for the physical world. Founded in 2018, it gives retailers, commercial real estate firms, brands, hospitality operators, and government agencies the same kind of click-level visibility that e-commerce takes for granted - but for stores, malls, restaurants, and Main Streets. The company crossed $100M ARR in 2024 and serves thousands of customers.
Gary Little
Gary Little is President and CEO of Foursquare, the world's leading independent location technology platform. A rare operator-investor hybrid, he spent six years running internet monetization at Yahoo, then pivoted into investment banking at Credit Suisse, Lazard, and UBS before co-founding Buckthorn Partners and rising to Managing Director at The Raine Group. At Raine he led the $150M Foursquare investment and negotiated the company's transformative acquisitions of Placed and Factual - then stepped into the CEO seat himself in January 2021. Under his leadership, Foursquare has evolved from a nostalgic social check-in app into the dominant infrastructure layer for location intelligence, covering 190 countries, indexing over 200 million points of interest, and powering the geospatial stacks of enterprises across retail, advertising, real estate, and urban planning.