Netherlands-based Ellipsis Drive raises €1.9M for its spatial data sharing platform

Netherlands-based Ellipsis Drive, a provider of a plug-and-play solution for using, sharing, and selling spatial data, has raised $2.3M (approx €1.9M) in its Seed round of funding.

Spatial data, also known as geospatial data, is a term used to describe any data related to or containing information about a specific location on the Earth’s surface.

Investors in this round

This Seed round was led by Promus Ventures, through its Luxembourg-based space investment fund, Orbital Ventures, and had participation from Techstars. 

Promus Ventures has backed high-profile companies in the geospatial sector including RockeLab, Mapbox, Spire, and ICEYE, among others.

With this investment, Pierre Festal, partner at Promus Ventures, and Dr. Jonathan Fentzke, Managing Director at Techstars, will be joining the board of Ellipsis Drive. 

“This funding will help us introduce Ellipsis Drive as the solution that makes the now painful exchange of spatial content easy and profitable,” says Rosalie van der Maas, CEO at Ellipsis Drive.

What does Ellipsis Drive offer?

The startup was founded in 2018 by Daniel van der Maas, Minghai Jiang, and Rosalie van der Maas. Ellipsis Drive is an online tool that allows any professional to activate, manage, and share spatial content via the web in under 10 minutes.

The platform allows collaborators to share content and make project edits using the tools as well as any browser. This makes it easy to connect your content to anyone from technical specialists to casual users in record time, claims the company. 

“It’s like Google Drive but for spatial data, and much more interoperable. We can be the missing piece of infrastructure in the transition towards a more collaborative spatial data landscape,” says Minghai Jiang, co-founder, and CIO.

According to Ellipsis Drive, it is eager to do away with archaic license-based business models that have been limiting professionals’ ability to share, collaborate and commercialise their work. 

“The tribalism we see taking place as companies seek to protect their markets by making it very difficult to collaborate across tools, professional silos, and data sets is holding us all back,” says Daniel van der Maas, co-founder and CTO of Ellipsis Drive. 

“Our business model, a simple storage-based fee for the space you need to activate your projects, doesn’t give us any adverse incentives. We simply seek to be the most value-added place to host your data by making sure your content can be found and can be connected to by any audience, without limitations. Our interests and those of our users are perfectly aligned. That’s how we keep creating value long term,” he adds.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The funding amount was earlier mentioned as €1.8M, which has been changed to €1.9M. The headline has also been edited for the same.