A Scottsdale-based geospatial analytics and artificial intelligence company has raised a seed round of funding to build software that provides businesses with time and location data.
Wherobots closed the $5.5 million round co-led by Wing Venture Capital and Clear Ventures, both of which are based in Palo Alto, California, the company announced.
The new infusion of capital will accelerate Wherobots’ hiring efforts as well as advance research and development in spatial data and AI, according to the company.
Wherobots' geospatial software is used by companies like Amazon.com (Nasdaq: AMZN), for example, to track every step in the delivery process as packages travel from suppliers and warehouses to customers.
“When you click on your app and buy an item, there's AI software algorithms in the back-end doing all the work just for that package to make it to your door,” Mo Sarwat, Wherobots' co-founder and CEO, said. “Our software helps (businesses) relate all the data about drivers, customers and warehouses to space and time and to where everything is happening."
Wherobots was founded in 2022 by Sarwat and Jia Yu. Sarwat is an associate professor of computer science and engineering at Arizona State University. His research includes development of scalable data systems for spatial and spatiotemporal applications.
The idea for Wherobots was sparked after the two co-founders created Apache Sedona, a free, open-source software that operates much like the company's current platform.
“We just posted it online and we thought maybe five or 10 people will find it useful,” Sarwat said. “We realized that we received a lot of traction on the free, open-source software. Fast forward to today, the software had been downloaded more than 14 million times and it has been used in operation and production at Fortune 500 companies, startups and new economy companies.”
Once realizing there was a need in the business-to-business market for geospatial software, Sarwat and Yu created Wherobots.
“This is where we realized, ‘OK, we have free, open-source software, but we should create a company that will actually take that kind of concept, commercialize it and make it more enterprise ready,’” Sarwat said.
The recent funding announcement coincides with Wherobots’ beta software release, which brings spatial computing and AI technology to developers. The spatial data infrastructure can be used in applications for the automotive, logistics, supply chain, insurance, real estate, agriculture and climate technology sectors.
"Wherobots has demonstrated exceptional expertise in developing advanced geospatial data infrastructure and AI technology, and we are thrilled to support their continued growth and innovation," Peter Wagner, partner at Wing Venture Capital, said in a statement.
Wherobots plans to release a free community version of its software in the coming months. It also aims to potentially add more features to its platform in the future, including a business-to-business version that executives can use to gain insight on where customers shop and how much money they spend in particular geographic areas.
Wherobots, which has seven employees including interns from Arizona State University, anticipates growing its workforce to 15 to 20 people within a year, Sarwat said.
The company is currently hiring software engineers, cloud platform engineers, developer relations engineers and product managers, according to its website.
“Our No. 1 priority is increasing adoption and momentum for Wherobots among developers, data engineers, data scientists, AI engineers and ML engineers," Sarwat said. "The other priority is definitely building the team. We have a small team now, but we want to grow it. We want to have our core team before we go for another round of financing.”
