Yesterday, as we covered here at Geo Week News, was the annual celebration of GIS Day, marking 25 years since the inaugural celebration. As we covered in that linked article, GIS as a tool has made an impact across so many different sectors, and thanks to bigger focuses on spatial context in general along with artificial intelligence helping to analyze and contextualize large amounts of data, usage only figures to increase.
However, one of the big issues with growing GIS usage among different stakeholders – particularly those who are not experts in the field – is that the software doesn’t necessarily exist for those beginners. At least, that’s the thought of Fredrik Moger, the CEO and co-founder of Atlas, a new cloud-based GIS platform that is targeting an emerging group of GIS users who see the value in the tool but are looking for easier-to-use, cloud-based collaborative tools. As Moger puts it, the company is looking to be to platforms like Esri and QGIS what Figma is to Adobe in the design space.
Geo Week News recently spoke with Moger about how Atlas came to be, the prospect of taking on industry stalwarts like Esri, and why the company’s general lack of geospatial expertise could be exactly the right recipe for what they’re looking to build.
The story of Atlas’ founding is simultaneously a classic one for the tech industry – a group of classmates came up with an idea while in college and took it out to the market – and a rare one for the geospatial industry given the aforementioned lack of experience in the sector. Moger tells Geo Week News that the idea for the company came during the founders’ time at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, where the group all came from different engineering and computer science backgrounds.
Together, they took an introductory GIS course where they had to use ArcGIS Pro and QGIS. Here, he says that they came across a problem that was ubiquitous throughout the class.
“The first couple of weeks, everyone was struggling so badly. For some reason, I don’t know why, but engineering students have this thin Macbook, and people were struggling so badly running the software on their desktop.”
Compared to the cloud-based tools they were used to running, the Atlas team was surprised by how the dominant solutions within the GIS field differed so greatly. So, they began “hacking around” to try and create a cloud-based solution – again, using Figma as inspiration – and 21 months later Moger reports they have 20,000 sign-ups for their platform.
What’s most striking about Atlas and their team is the aforementioned lack of geospatial experience within the group – and really any working experience. Moger acknowledges that if one were to look at the previous employment for most of the team, the previous title would be their summer internships.
Still, he doesn’t necessarily view that lack of specific geospatial expertise as a non-starter for the company. While he acknowledges that there are “obviously some flaws” with the approach and that they know they will need that skillset and understanding “down the line”, he notes that as engineers and even computer science majors, they worked “quite a lot” with geospatial data. On top of that, their big idea with the platform is to attract those non-experts, so being on that same level gives them advantages as product developers.
“In one way, we’re actually representing the whole market that’s struggling using geospatial tools,” Moger explains. “In some sense, I feel like we’re actually experts in building this tool because we are the users of it. It would probably be helpful to have more of that [geospatial] skillset and understanding down the line, but as of now it’s easy for us to gather around the mission because I feel like we have the same needs, and same problems, with the existing GIS tools.”
Of course, thinking of a company like Esri – which currently dominates the GIS market – a significant portion of their customer base comes from sectors like government and intelligence, where data security is at a premium. That can lead to issues for a cloud-based platform like Atlas. So, how does Moger plan to cut into that market? For now, he’s happy to let the Esris of the world have that.
“I think it’s all about timing,” he says. “I think it wouldn’t make sense to go into this space and try to compete with Esri in the government or defense space, because you need to build so much infrastructure to allow people to handle the security. I think, sure, down the line we want to compete with them on that, but I think this is not the right timing.”
Instead, the Atlas team is looking to focus on other markets that aren’t necessarily utilizing the technology right now, or have it siloed within small departments of GIS experts within the larger organization. Moger sees these new use cases – he gives renewable energy as one big example – as being cloud-native, and he’s trying to meet them where they’re at. In fact, he feels in some ways he’s building more of a no-code tool for these companies, but one that can handle geospatial data and maps in a way traditional no-code tools cannot. At the same time, they also think they can do what the existing GIS tools can’t.
“On the other side, you have some giant tools that are super good at geospatial analysis, and they’re super good at visualizing data in a map, but they’re so clunky to create interfaces, to create relations, to collaborate. They’re clunky at what all the new [non-geospatial] tools are good at, basically. That’s what we’re building – the opposite side.”
Looking forward, Moger sees plenty of room for growth for the company and is already plotting some next moves. For instance, he tells Geo Week News that they are “soon” releasing a new Forms offering within the platform, which he says will “enable people to build more full-stack applications where you can enable external people to contribute to the data set or to the project.” They hope this will breed more collaboration within these systems among stakeholders of all technical levels with a solution that will be “way cheaper” than some other competitors’ offerings for similar use cases.
Additionally, he says he sees the United States as the biggest market for GIS, and they want to figure out a way to get into this market. Today, Moger tells Geo Week News that roughly 30 percent of their user base is in the U.S., with 50 percent in Europe. He says the company is “really curious about figuring out how to go to the U.S. in the best possible way.”
Ultimately, it’s an ambitious goal for Atlas to try and, in many ways, turn the well-established GIS landscape on its head, particularly with a young team without industry expertise. But it’s exactly what Moger thinks will drive them forward and ultimately fill a need that is felt within the space.
“I feel like we’re hungry, and we have a clear vision of what we want to build.”
