Geospatial startup spins out of CSIRO

Geospatial tech startup Terria has spun out of CSIRO, Australia’s national science agency, after successfully closing a seed investment round with deep tech investment fund Main Sequence.

Terria organises and visualises the world’s spatial data, across thousands of mapping and information layers, to make it accessible and useful for everyone. It simplifies the complex process of creating digital twins, or online virtual replicas of buildings, cities, regions and countries, to enable modelling and investigation of ‘what if’ scenarios.

The seed funding will help support Terria’s global ambitions for its products, which can assist with planning and managing the cities of the future, the energy transition and environmental monitoring.

“Terria started in 2014, when the first open-data, open-source Australian Government platforms were created to help any organisation or individual to access and visualise spatial data,” said Terria CEO Ana Belgun, a former CSIRO employee.

“Since then, millions of users have accessed over 15,000 datasets on Terria mapping platforms.

“In this next phase we will scale the positive impact we have created so far for Australian companies and government agencies and take these advanced tools global to enable the creation and management of digital twins across different domains.

“With a predicted $50 billion growth in the geospatial data market in the next three years alone, Terria can help organisations to consolidate, access and use spatial data more effectively.”

Mike Nicholls, Partner at Main Sequence, said Terria solves a major mapping and data problem in our built and natural environment: how to catalogue, visualise and analyse all the natural and built data in a given location.

“We first saw Terria a few years ago in the CSIRO Data61 lab and loved the products and how they were being adopted by users,” Nicholls said.

“A typical city street has thousands of datasets and plans for buildings, streets, footpaths, electricity, water, sewage, telecommunications, parks, stations, transport, planning and the natural environment.

“Terria can bring all that data together integrating 80 different formats and visualise this on one map. We are excited to help spin this company out and look forward to them growing a huge customer base over the coming years.”

Image caption: A Terria digital twin image, showing a zoomed out Melbourne map and split screen. Image ©Terria, Cesium ION, City of Melbourne and Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles.