CARTO enters the Agentic GIS era with its founder as CEO

Today, at the Spatial Data Science Conference in New York, we are announcing that Javier de la Torre, CARTO’s founder and currently Chief Strategy Officer, will become CEO on November 1, as part of a transition Luis and Javier have been planning together for several months. Luis Sanz, CEO since 2019, will remain on our board of directors.

Spatial analysis is changing faster than at any point since we started this company. For the first time, the people who need spatial answers and the AI Agents that can produce them are working side by side, on the same data, with the same governance. We call it Agentic GIS, and it is the biggest opportunity CARTO has ever had.

The idea we started with, finally possible

Javier started CARTO on a simple idea: spatial analysis shouldn’t be reserved for a small group of specialists. Anyone with a question about location should be able to answer it.

Every chapter since has served that idea. When cloud data warehouses arrived, we rebuilt CARTO to run inside them, so teams could analyze data where it already lives. Agentic GIS is the same idea at a new scale. AI Agents inside CARTO bring spatial analysis to every team; CARTO for Agents brings the platform into the chat and coding agents people already use. The specialist is no longer the bottleneck. The data never moves.

“Luis led CARTO through the years that made it a cloud-native platform, and I’m grateful for everything he built. When I started CARTO, the goal was to make spatial analysis available to everyone. AI Agents make that possible at a scale we could only imagine before, and we are the company that makes GIS agentic. I’m ready to lead us there.”

Javier de la Torre

Sovereign by design

The same shift is reaching governments. Across Europe, public institutions are asking where their spatial data lives, who controls the infrastructure, and whether it can run on their own terms. CARTO SDI and the Portolan open specification are our answer: a cloud-native, open way to publish and operate spatial data as sovereign infrastructure. With work under way for European institutions and a growing number of national and regional bodies, this is a chapter we intend to lead from Europe.

For customers and partners, nothing changes in how we work with you: the same team, the same roadmap, the same support.

Thank you, Luis

Under Luis, CARTO became a cloud-native platform, grew into the enterprise and the public sector, and launched the first generation of Agentic GIS. That work is the foundation everything above is built on. Earlier this year, Luis told the board he wanted to step down once the company was ready for its next chapter, and he has spent the past months preparing that handover with Javier. He stays close as a member of our board.

“It has been a privilege to lead CARTO and this team since 2019. We have been working on this transition for a long time. No one is better placed than Javier to lead what comes next, and I look forward to supporting him from the board.”

Luis Sanz

See it at SDSC

Javier’s keynote on where Agentic GIS is headed is on stage today. To see Agentic GIS in action, request a demo.