What is CARTO?
From smartphones to connected cars, location data is changing the way we live and the way we run businesses. Everything happens somewhere, but visualizing data to see where things are isn’t the same as understanding why they happen there. CARTO is the world’s leading Location Intelligence platform, enabling organizations to use spatial data and analysis for more efficient delivery routes, better behavioural marketing, strategic store placements, and much more. Data Scientists, Developers and Analysts use CARTO to optimize business processes, and predict future outcomes through the power of Spatial Data Science.
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Our story
CARTO was founded in 2012 in Madrid by Javier de la Torre and Sergio Álvarez. After several years working on Conservation and Environmental projects they decided it was time to improve the technology available to analyze and visualize large amounts of location data.
Analyzing location data at scale is critical to understand environmental topics like biodiversity loss or climate change, but it is also crucial for businesses in other industries such as Insurance, Financial Services, Telecoms and many more. They saw an opportunity to bring spatial analysis to a wider range of organizations and industries that had previously not been able to use it.
Since then, the platform has gone from strength to strength, with hundreds of thousands of users now allowing millions of people to see stories and solve problems through a spatial lens.
In 2019, Luis Sanz joined CARTO as CEO and Geographica was acquired to bring further Spatial Data Science capabilities. In 2020, the company’s Data Observatory project received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program to continue building and strengthening the leading spatial data marketplace in the world.
CARTO is headquartered in New York, with additional offices in Madrid and Seville - with a team of more than 160 experts in spatial analysis and GIS development. Our team is passionate about Open Source developments and regularly contributes in a wide range of communities, such as the PostGIS community.
Our Mission
80% of data generated has a location component, yet only 10% of spatial data is actually used by organizations.
Spatial analysis has traditionally been considered too complex for general use, making it largely disconnected from the business environment and limited to a niche community of GIS experts working in a silo. Now, with the growth of Data Science and every company wanting to become not only data-driven, but also spatially aware - we are entering an era of Spatial Data Science, where new users need new data to carry out new types of analysis.
Organizations are already facing a shortage of Data Science professionals in the market, and an even smaller percentage of them have expertise in spatial analysis. CARTO’s goal is to spatially enable every Data Scientist - making them more productive and impactful within their companies.
