LGND just raised $9 million to make geospatial data way smarter — and cheaper. The startup’s focus: slicing the massive cost and time of analyzing satellite imagery. Think fire breaks in California — spotting and tracking those was slow and pricey, requiring humans or costly, one-off machine learning models. LGND aims to cut that effort by 10x to 100x.
The company’s secret weapon? Geographic vector embeddings. These aren’t your usual pixels or map lines. Embeddings create fast, universal summaries of spatial data, helping software spot patterns like fire breaks — roads, rivers, or lakes that block wildfires — with much less compute.
LGND already has an enterprise app plus an API for custom geospatial queries. They envision a future where you ask AI for fine-tuned map info in seconds: Is there a rental by a white sand beach with no seaweed in February, zero construction nearby, and good snorkeling spots? 
Co-founder Nathaniel Manning says this tech could flip how businesses handle earth data, tapping into the nearly $400 billion geospatial market.
“Originally, you’d have a person look at pictures. And that only scales so far,” Nathaniel Manning, co-founder and CEO of LGND, told TechCrunch.
“You probably sink, you know, couple hundred thousand dollars — if not multiple hundred thousand dollars — to try to create that data set, and it would only be able to do that one thing.”
“We’re trying to be the Standard Oil for this data,” Manning said.
Co-founder and chief scientist Bruno Sánchez-Andrade Nuño added:
“We are not looking to replace people doing these things.
We’re looking to make them 10 times more efficient, one hundred times more efficient.”
“Embeddings get you 90% of all the undifferentiated compute up front,” Nuño said.
“Embeddings are the universal, super-short summaries that embody 90% of the computation you have to do anyways.”
The $9 million seed round was led by Javelin Venture Partners with support from AENU, Clocktower Ventures, Coalition Operators, MCJ, Overture, Ridgeline, Space Capital, and angel investors like Keyhole founder John Hanke and Ramp co-founder Karim Atiyeh.
LGND is betting on making spatial analysis fast, cheap, and accessible for companies drowning in earth data. The question: will their embeddings become the new standard?
