When you use a mapping service to navigate from point A to point B, you are always presented with beautiful imagery and a three-dimensional view of various points of attraction.
While consumers love these views, there is clever engineering behind the scenes to make these visuals appeal to end users.
That’s the significance of spatial data and it often doesn’t dawn on consumers how difficult it is to turn spatial data into live maps and services.
“Spatial data management is a major challenge for many companies and organisations,” says Rosalie van der Maas, co-founder and CEO of Ellipsis Drive.
Ellipsis Drive is a Dutch startup based in the Netherlands, building cloud native plug and play solutions for easy collaboration and sharing of spatial data.
With July on track to be Earth’s hottest month on record, spatial data has a newfound importance and Ellipsis Drive is on a mission to remove any overhead and friction around it.
Friction around spatial data
Data management is a well established enterprise business but most organisations focus only on data availability, analytics and/or visualisation.
However, not many companies have set out to solve the highly complex and burdensome overhead associated with spatial data.
With Ellipsis Drive, Van Der Maas says they are focused on ending the friction around spatial data ingestion, management, and integration.
“This may sound like a boring piece of infrastructure, but it’s critical in making spatial data consumable for everyone, and empowering the industry,” she adds.
The team at Ellipsis Drive observed that handling spatial data is both expensive and time consuming.
They also saw the difficulty ingesting, managing, and integrating spatial data from multiple sources in a complex data environment.
One of the problems with spatial data management is that there aren’t any solutions out there that support “automated ingestion of location data into unified and standardised data warehouses.”
Another challenge, probably one that is all too familiar in the data industry, is the lack of support for interoperability.
Van Der Maas further adds that current solutions also do not “support high performance searchability and usability in downstream analytics workflows and products.”
If it sounds like a tall order to fix, it is because it’s indeed a challenging task, but Ellipsis Drive has a solution.
The Dutch startup overcomes the friction with spatial data by outfitting its clients’ infrastructure and data warehouses with technology that automates spatial data ingestion and makes it easy to manage and integrate it into downstream systems and processes.
Like Drive for Office documents
One of the first steps in removing friction with any data service is by designing it to be easier and effective.
Ellipsis Drive did just that with spatial data where users have to upload spatial files to the platform like they do with their office documents.
The uploaded spatial files are converted into “beautiful live maps and web services” and the platform looks similar to Google Drive in function.
Apart from functionality, the technology is another area where Ellipsis Drive tries hard to stand out.
Once the spatial data is uploaded, the files are parsed, tiled, reprojected and indexed into fully interoperable, web-based data layers.
Think of it like uploading spatial data and getting results in the form of satellite, terrain, traffic, and other views available on your navigation app.
These interoperable, web-based data layers can be used by any audience authorised by its owners and can be visualised directly in a browser or integrated into specific tools and applications.
Van Der Maas says their clients integrate the data layers into their “workflows with a wide selection of fit-for-purpose packages and plugins.”
Versatile for professionals
Ellipsis Drive is being used by data scientists, developers, GIS personnel, domain experts, and non-technical professionals.
Its user base includes several industries, including insurance, real estate, data & analytics companies.
“What they all have in common though is that they are all ingesting, managing and integrating spatial data into their internal operations as well as those of their clients or user base,” elaborates Van Der Maas.
One of Ellipsis Drive’s clients is Fathom, a global leader in water risk intelligence, using the platform to expand their data delivery and accessibility for insurance, engineering and financial markets by providing an easy-to-use viewer for their flood maps.
The startup also helps the UK’s Ordnance Survey to provide startups with easy access to their geospatial content in order to accelerate their growth.
One of the challenges for spatial data professionals is that creating analytics requires a foundational data management infrastructure.
Van Der Maas explains, “When such infrastructure is missing, data professionals will spend some 80 per cent of their time building this ad hoc, only to run into scaling and feature limitations later.”
With Ellipsis Drive, Ordnance Survey saves startups the pain of building this infrastructure and helps them focus on creating impactful analytics right away.
Ellipsis Drive also helped Continuum Industries to bring its product, Optioneer, to market. It helps power, utility and renewables companies to instantly visualise, analyse and comprehensively assess routing options for power lines, cables and pipelines.
Optioneer has already supported over 23,000 km of assets and achieved a 66 per cent reduction in time to complete route development.
Italian startup Latitudo40 also uses Ellipsis Drive to help its users understand their risk and identify the most fitting mitigation solutions.
In a nutshell, Ellipsis Drive removes the burden of manual spatial data ingestion, management, and integration.
AWS to power the spatial data
Like many European startups, Ellipsis Drive is also relying on Amazon Web Services (AWS) to power its ambitious spatial data management service.
“We chose to grow our business into AWS as we found they are very well entrenched in the market we are also servicing and growing into,” says Van Der Maas.
Another way AWS helps Ellipsis Drive is that the cloud platform matches their client’s cloud environment of choice and makes it easier to deploy private instances of Ellipsis Drive.
The startup also sees AWS as a partner helping on deals and recognising that Ellipsis Drive offers “something unique in the market.”
Van Der Maas adds, “The partnership also generates inbound opportunities where Ellipsis Drive gets pulled into deals where end users are in need of spatial data management solutions.”
As a young startup, Ellipsis Drive would never be able to match the reach that AWS offers in a competitive European tech landscape.
It also helps that the Dutch startup is part of the AWS marketplace, allowing for vendor approval and budget allocation easier with clients who already have a commitment with AWS.
Growth and efficiency
At the time of writing, Ellipsis Drive had raised $10,000 in pre-seed from Techstars in 2020. The startup raised around $2.3M in seed funding in 2021 and hasn’t raised additional funding since.
Van Der Maas acknowledges that it is a conscious decision by the company to not raise funding if it doesn’t need to.
She says the focus is to become self-sufficient or as she likes to call it “default alive”, and would be music to ears of PEs and VCs looking for startups prioritising efficiency over growth at all costs.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise that Van Der Maas credits her co-founders and the leadership team for making this business model work.
She advises founders looking to bootstrap their way to success to make sure they have co-founders and team members who know what they are signing up for.
“That way you can draw strength from each other rather than feel drained by the people around you,” says Van Der Maas.
She adds, “There will always be ups and downs, and it’s best to face them surrounded by people who have your back and will stick with you through thick and thin.”
While Ellipsis Drive has efficiency completely dialled in, it is not signing off from growth.
For starters, it is looking to hire sales leaders in the US, which is an expansion target for the startup, and is also looking to grow the number of private instance deployments over the next 12 months.
As scientists declared July as the world’s hottest month on record, UN secretary general Antonio Guterres said “the era of global boiling has arrived.”
In this era of global boiling, the stakes for quality spatial data is higher than usual and Ellipsis Drive is uniquely positioned to help organisations make sense of that complex data.
Read the orginal article: https://siliconcanals.com/news/startups/ellipsis-drive-spatial-data-ai-risk-management/
