Wherobots is a geospatial data analytics and AI startup founded by Mo Sarwat and Jia Yu . Their fast growing technology is being used by a variety of industries for the processing of geospatial data in the cloud. It provides a turnkey way to perform ETL, spatial join, spatial queries, and geometric operations on geospatial data and is cloud-agnostic and seamlessly adapts to data stack as well as your infrastructure.

Wherobots recently raised a sizable seed round through Clear Ventures (Vijay Reddy) and Wing VC (Peter Wagner), an early investor in Snowflake.

Mo Sarwat is the original creator of Apache Sedona, an open source scalable system for processing big geospatial data downloaded more than 10 million times. Both founders have been building their expertise in this geospatial analytics space for years, in both a business and educational setting.

The Problem

Every single piece of data collected has a geospatial and time aspect to it, everything collected by your phone, what you bought, what you are considering buying, where you travel, and so on. This data is powerful and the amount of data being collected is approaching exobyte levels (1 billion gigabytes). If you are a business you are most likely collecting this data, but analytics teams need a platform that can make sense of it in order to derive business value. The amount and complexity of this data is too much for historic analytics engines to process.

Geospatial data that is phenomenally powerful. The data collected about the earth’s surface and the objects on it can help with much more than just geographic mapping. Spatial data can be combined with other data from various sources, creating different data layers. Things like weather data, census data, satellite imagery, aerial photography and even social media data can help to build up visualizations that tell us a lot about the world around us. If leveraged effectively, geospatial data will solve problems to help society across urban planning, infectious disease, natural disasters, environmental, public safety and so many more. All of this data exists, but how we structure it, use it, and make sense of it is the challenge.

The Solution

Wherobots enables every organization to extract business value from data via spatial location and time. They are Democratizing the development and deployment of the geospatial data processing and analytics stack allowing users to develop, test, and deploy in-situ geospatial data stack in the cloud. Users do not have to worry about the hassle of cloud administration, workload scalability, or geospatial processing support / optimization.

Wherobots provides Spatial SQL, Spatial Join, Integration with Spark, Geopandas, managed/scalable spatial data pipeline, geospatial data science & engineering education, custom geospatial data processing functions to name a few.

They allow data scientists and engineering teams to easily incorporate geospatial processing in their data pipelines.

Market Opportunity

This industry is expected to reach between 300B-600B by 2030. The data itself is recession proof as it powers “last mile” delivery, Telecommunications, Insurance, Autonomous vehicles, environmental causes, etc. Businesses extract tremendous value when they can process this data at scale. Wherobots is providing the technology that enables companies to achieve this.

Wherobots SaaS Product

Wherobots plans to officially launch at the end of Q1 2023 with an initial focus on current Apache Sedona customers bringing them onboard with Wherobots. The team is currently working on their MVP and partnering with some top global organizations. Shortly after they will incorporate new industries including Delivery & Logistics, Automotive & Autonomous Vehicles, Telco/Cell Providers, and top data companies.

Wherobots is both a standalone cloud based geospatial analytics processing app and also integrates with cloud based data platforms including Google Cloud, Azure, Snowflake, Databricks and all major players. It also integrates with analytics developer tools including Spatial Python, Spatial SQL and can integrate code with popular data tools such as Spark, Flink, Hadoop and PostgreSQL.

The target users for the first version of their product are data scientists & developers working within analytics functions. Wherobots is building the engine that does the dirty work behind the scenes, building the magic sauce algorithms to process this data within the customers current database. The output can drive delivery route transformation and efficiency gains, improve telecommunications infrastructure, improve autonomous vehicles, and be pulled into data visualization tools so the business can derive value from the geospatial data that they are collecting.

Funding

Seed Round (Clear Ventures and Wing VC)

Seed funding will be used to hired their engineering and products teams, additional investment in the product, and build GTM capabilities towards the end of 2023.

Executive Team

Mo Sarwat , Co-Founder & CEO

Jia Yu , Co-Founder & Chief Open Source Officer

Board Members & Advisors

Mo Sarwat , Co-Founder & CEO

Jia Yu , Co-Founder & Chief Open Source Officer

Vijay Reddy , Partner at Clear Ventures

Peter Wagner, Managing Partner at Wing Capital

Job Profile

Wherobots was co-founded by the creator of Apache Sedona, an open-source cluster computing system for processing large-scale spatial data that has already been downloaded more than 10M times. Mo Sarwat and Jin have been building their expertise in geospatial data for many years across business and academia. Both founders have PhD's in computer science with larger scale data management. The company was founded in June 2022, but has been years in the making. Wherobots raised a strong seed round in Q4 2022 backed by Clear Ventures and Wing Capital. Wherobots enables every organization to extract business value from data via spatial location and time.

Position Overview

As the Head of Engineering for Wherobots, you will be instrumental in the success of the organization. As the Head of Engineering you will report to the Co-Founder and CEO. This player-coach will be responsible for growing, leading, and developing a strong team of engineers. As a hands-on leader, you will have a startup mindset and be comfortable rolling up your sleeves and working along side the team as needed.

Responsibilities

• Serve as the technical leader for a small, technically strong team.
• Use modern tools and techniques to contribute to full lifecycle software architecture, roadmap, development, and testing.
• Lead mentoring and training of the engineering team while instilling a strong, collaborative culture and structure.
• Recruit and retain world-class engineering talent.
• Establish a culture of collaboration and effective communication in building a top-notch team dynamic.
• Share information and ideas to improve project execution and outcomes; be comfortable giving and receiving constructive feedback.
• Implement an engineering approach to prepare the organization for significant scale.

Qualifications

• BA or BS, preferably in computer science, engineering or science / technology-based disciplines.
• Demonstrated experience hiring, mentoring, and leading engineering teams.
• Strong and recent hands-on engineering experience with an emphasis on cloud and data.
• Track record of building structure and process in engineering environments.
• Expertise in building a SaaS platform for a cloud product.
• Experience with cloud deployment, integrating data pipelines, and data flow systems.
• Experience and success within a startup environment or a deep interest in being a part of a fast-growing startup.

Preferred Technical Expertise

• Database Management
• SQL
• Cloud Deployment & Cloud Tech (AWS, Google, Azure, etc)
• Docker/K8
• Data Pipelines
• Data Integration
• Data Flow Systems
• Apache Flow/Spark
• React (Front End), Typescript, Java, and Javascript (BackEnd)
• Experience and success within a startup environment or a deep interest in being a part of a fast-growing startup.

Job Location : Remote Work (Preferably based in Seattle or Scottsdale, AZ) / Open to Remote US.

Company Benefits : Wherobots offers comprehensive health insurance covered 100% by the employer and unlimited PTO.

Recruiting Contacts @ Scalrr

Steve Bonomo

Co-Founder @ Scalar

(503) 348-2351

steve@scalrr.org

Steve Fogarty

Co-Founder @ Scalrr

(503) 341-3362

stephen@scalrr.org

About Scalrr

Scalrr is a boutique talent advisory and leadership recruiting firm partnering with early and growth stage / VC-backed startups to build strong leadership teams and hiring capabilities. Co-Founded by recruiting industry veterans Steve Bonomo and Steve Fogarty who spent nearly two decades together leading recruiting efforts for both adidas and Twitter on a global basis. Steve Bonomo was most recently a Partner with Riviera Partners Ventures division leading executive searches for Seed to B stage companies.