These days, more and more satellites orbit the atmosphere, providing vast amounts of geospatial data, but converting that data into something useful requires significant processing and engineering power.
Sina Kashuk and Isaac Brodsky, two former Uber engineers who helped build the mapping system at Uber, decided to apply their knowledge to this problem and came up with a fast, serverless-based solution. It was a product. leverages open source tools built by the company to take data from the source, bring it into apps, and make it work there.
Today, the startup has emerged from stealth using the Fused platform and $1 million in pre-seed funding.
Fused is a three-part system. Data sourced from the satellite is stored in a storage repository and made available for execution and use through the platform. The ultimate goal is to create visual representations of things like weather, deforestation, and crop data and make that data available in applications that people use, such as Excel, Airtable, and Notion. The difference from the previous one is simplicity and processing speed.
Kashuk, co-founder and CEO of Fused, says the company took time to create its current solution. In fact, after leaving Uber, they announced that in 2019 he founded another company called Unfolded.ai looking at similar data visualization problems, but it was quickly acquired by Foursquare. Ta.
“The main challenge we faced with Unfolded was that the platform was largely open source and people thought, 'Why do I have to pay when I can just use open source?' “It was very difficult to bring it to market,” Kashuk told TechCrunch.
This was an issue with our business model, but we also ran into limitations as we were trying to run our front-end solution locally on our laptops and it became extremely slow as our data grew. As they were thinking about their next business, Kashuk and Brodsky saw an opportunity in the growing number of data transmitted from commercial satellites, and realized that back-end data processing remained a challenge and a potential business. I noticed.
Specifically, the founders see the maturation of serverless computing, where vendors can handle all backend infrastructure, as an opportunity to help customers process this data and make use of it more quickly and efficiently. I saw it. “So the serverless movement, combined with the large amount of data coming from the growing commercial satellite industry, led us to believe that the industry was ready for this kind of change,” Kaszuk said. Stated.
The platform is essentially a middleware processing layer that helps turn geospatial data into something more usable. It consists of several open source parts and a serverless processing engine. It is the latter that makes the company profitable. Fused gets paid every time data reaches an API gateway to a serverless backend.
A working fusion workbench.Image credit: Fusion
The entire system is built in Python, which is widely used by data scientists and developers. The system starts with a type of visualization template called a user-defined function or UDF. This part is open source and allows the community to create templates, such as crop yields, and use other parts of the Fused platform to create templates, such as the amount of wheat produced per U.S. state or geographic region. You can start analyzing your data. you want
This data can then be transferred to other programs for further analysis or to create data visualizations based on the data. One of the big differentiators here is the speed at which Fused can create these visualizations and process changes to visualizations. The company says it takes seconds instead of hours.
One of the key platforms involved in creating visualizations is Fused Workbench, which is available starting today. He said that while the workbench is partially open and only works in conjunction with the backend API, it allows you to manipulate data to see different aspects and see changes almost instantly. can do.
The company was founded last year and has been working with early beta customers until its appearance today. Pre-seed of $1 million was provided by Fontinalis Partners and various industry angels.