The AI Context Engine
for the Physical World

Wherobots is the AI Context Engine for the Physical World. It gives data engineers, data scientists, and AI developers a unified platform for geospatial analytics, satellite imagery analysis, and spatial AI at planetary scale. WherobotsDB handles distributed spatial compute with 300+ spatial functions covering vector and raster data, with native Spark SQL for tabular operations. RasterFlow runs satellite imagery analysis at any scale. The Spatial AI Coding Assistant connects to VS Code and every major AI coding environment. Built by the original creators of Apache Sedona (68M+ downloads), 100% code compatible across all spatial functions.

Yes. Wherobots connects to your data wherever it lives without requiring migration. For Amazon S3, WherobotsDB reads and writes directly to your own S3 buckets using cross-account IAM roles. For Databricks users, WherobotsDB connects to Unity Catalog and runs geospatial analytics on data already in your lakehouse. For teams using AWS Glue, WherobotsDB connects to AWS Glue Catalog as an Iceberg catalog, letting you manage and query your existing Iceberg tables from Wherobots Spark workloads. Apache Sedona workloads running in AWS Glue, Databricks, or EMR run on WherobotsDB with zero code changes. Spatial SQL and Python pipelines you have already written work without modification. For Wherobots-native storage, tables are stored in Havasu, Wherobots’ spatial table format built on Apache Iceberg, which adds native geometry and raster column types, ACID transactions, schema evolution, and time travel.

PostGIS runs on a single machine and cannot scale horizontally. Teams that outgrow PostGIS face a hard ceiling on geospatial data analysis at scale. WherobotsDB handles planetary-scale distributed geospatial analytics across billions of geometries. Google Earth Engine splits raster and vector into separate systems with separate APIs. WherobotsDB unifies both with 300+ spatial functions covering vector and raster data, with native Spark SQL for tabular operations. Databricks runs spatial joins using 90+ geometry and geography functions, but don’t extend beyond these to the completeness Wherobots offers. According to the Apache Sedona SpatialBench benchmark at Scale Factor 1000, WherobotsDB delivers up to 20x faster geospatial operations than traditional big data engines. In production, teams have seen processing times drop from 39 days to under one day.

The Spatial AI Coding Assistant is available on the Visual Studio Marketplace. Install it there to write and run spatial queries directly from VS Code. For Claude Code, OpenCode, and other agentic development tools, install the Wherobots MCP server. The MCP server gives your AI coding environment direct access to Wherobots, including the ability to design queries against your spatial data estate, understand datasets in S3 and Databricks Unity Catalog, and run those queries on WherobotsDB. Support for additional coding environments is expanding.

Wherobots was founded in June 2022 by Jia Yu and Mo Sarwat, the researchers who created Apache Sedona at Arizona State University. Apache Sedona is the most widely deployed open-source distributed spatial engine in the world, with 68M+ downloads. It runs on Apache Spark and Apache Flink and supports spatial SQL, Python, Java, and Scala. WherobotsDB extends the capabilities of Apache Sedona and is 100% code compatible, meaning any Apache Sedona workload runs on Wherobots with zero code changes. Wherobots adds managed cloud infrastructure, RasterFlow for satellite imagery analysis at any scale, and the Spatial AI Coding Assistant on top of the Apache Sedona foundation.

Apache Sedona is used in production by over 20,000 organizations for geospatial data processing within distributed compute environments as an add on library. It’s used within Databricks, AWS EMR, Microsoft Fabric, Google Dataproc, and open source self hosted Apache Spark and Flink (among others). Wherobots is a fully managed, provisioned, and performance optimized runtime for Apache Sedona that is anywhere from 3-20X faster and more computationally efficient. Furthermore, Wherobots Cloud offers serverless runtimes for both WherobotsDB (our optimized version of Sedona on Spark) as well as RasterFlow, which is an independent engine for running computer vision models at in batch processing on GPUs. Beyond these two spatial data processing engines, Wherobots Cloud provides a managed Apache Iceberg catalog that has provided type support for Geometry, Geography and Satellite imagery long before open source Iceberg has caught up, and we drove the innovation within the Iceberg and Delta lake communities to provide this type support. Wherobots offers additional evolving capabilities including: and MCP server and AI coding tools, mapping and visualization tools both within notebooks and as a standalone product, model management for computer vision and other models, and advanced data management. For a complete overview of our product capabilities review our product pages.

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