about us
Our story
Founded back in 2012, CARTO has become the world’s leading Location Intelligence platform - allowing hundreds of thousands of users to unlock the power of spatial analysis.
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What is CARTO?
CARTO is the leading Location Intelligence SaaS platform empowering companies with cloud-native spatial analytics. CARTO helps organizations make better business decisions by enabling data analysts, business analysts, GIS professionals, and developers with scalable, faster, more flexible, and more secure spatial data analysis and visualization tools.
Whether through optimizing network planning, assessing risk, identifying growth opportunities, or other use cases, companies benefit from turning their location data into business value.
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Our story
CARTO began in 2012 when Javier de la Torre and Sergio Álvarez founded the company in Madrid. Their experience in conservation and environmental projects revealed a critical need: better tools for analyzing and visualizing large-scale location data.
While spatial analysis was essential for understanding environmental challenges like biodiversity loss and climate change, the founders recognized its broader potential. They saw that industries such as insurance, financial services, and telecommunications could benefit from these tools, which had previously been inaccessible to many organizations.
The platform grew rapidly, eventually reaching hundreds of thousands of users who use CARTO to solve problems through spatial analysis.
Several key developments marked CARTO's evolution. In 2019, Luis Sanz became CEO, and the company acquired Geographica to enhance its spatial data science capabilities. In 2020, CARTO's Data Observatory project received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program, supporting its goal to build the world's leading spatial data marketplace
Today, CARTO is headquartered in New York, with offices in Madrid and Seville. The company employs over 160 experts in spatial analysis and GIS development. True to its innovative roots, CARTO's team actively contributes to open-source projects, particularly in the PostGIS community.
Our Mission
Historically, spatial analysis has been complex and siloed, restricted to a niche group of GIS experts. However, as the field of spatial analytics grows and businesses strive to become spatially aware, the demand for accessible Location Intelligence is increasing.
CARTO aims to bridge this gap and break down the GIS data silo, enhancing the productivity of organizations globally.
