Soar is an Australian early stage company with an ambitious mission, to build the world’s new atlas - a mapping platform bringing together every map, satellite and drone image that has ever existed, or will ever exist, all available in one place.

This ground breaking endeavour marks a pivotal moment in the mapping industry, reminiscent of the transformative impact Google Earth had in 2001. As a result, we are looking for extraordinary partners and investors, because what we are doing isn’t ordinary - to help us build something that is truly intergenerational and of importance to the whole of humanity.

Soar has built a free and easy-to-use mapping platform where users from all over the world can upload and share their maps, as well as access an enormous, ever-growing library of maps, drone, and satellite imagery, and share their content. Users can also access over 640,000 maps uploaded by our ever growing global community of users ranging from NASA satellite feeds, through to geological and topographic maps by Stanford University and the British Library

WHY BUILD THE WORLDS NEW ATLAS AND WHY NOW?

With the release of Google Earth in 2001 and Google Maps in 2005, society and technology embarked on what many thought was the start of the ‘geospatial era’, or so we thought. Since then, we have seen surges in the capability of a range of new technologies such as smart phones, 3G/4G/5G data communications, more satellites, consumer drones, faster internet speed, better technology and access.

So, we must ask - Why hasn’t this one sector evolved dramatically over the last 20 years? The answer is in the structure of how the industry had evolved and adopted innovations with it being held back by:

• Reseller contracts
• Fragmented distribution technology
• Lack of cloud infrastructure
• Poorly built map tiling engines

Now, there is more map data being created daily – in the order of hundreds of terabytes - which is leading to a massive oversupply of data that is now allowing this sector to be disrupted.

The current problem users face is easy access to maps where they are held within silos, making discovery and access difficult for users who are not geospatial experts. These problems can be summarised as:

• 80% of the world’s maps are dispersed across various disconnected channels, posing challenges for their discovery and accessibility.
• Existing repositories such as Google Earth and Bing Maps represent just one type of data.
• Millions of petabytes of maps and imagery are tucked away, hidden between hard drives, closed cloud services as well as sitting on non-interchangeable platforms such as social media.
• Data is often hard to access, only available as prints, are not in a geo-referenced digital format and there is often little or no interoperability.
• Unique, high-quality information is often hidden away and is not discoverable.

Soar solves this problem by bringing together all these maps from all diverse places into a single location to make it easily discoverable for users in a single place.

Soar is creating a new category-defining platform for geospatial data ,including all types of maps and imagery. This model has been a successful one for content distribution and sharing in many other markets such as files, video, and music. The graphic below shows the businesses that have positioned themselves to create new market categories and in-turn become ubiquitous.

BUILDING THE DEFINING GENERATIVE AI FOR MAPS

The pivotal element in all generative AI models is access to training data, commonly known as ‘reinforcement learning.’ This stream of data essentially fuels the AI infrastructure crafted by companies such as OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, etc.

Soar is poised to develop the premier generative AI tailored for geospatial applications, leveraging its access to the world’s most extensive map library. As the Soar platform accumulates more mapping data, it not only enhances the intelligence of this AI but also reinforces its competitive advantage, creating a formidable barrier against potential competitors. This, in turn, positions Soar to eventually establish itself as an incumbent in the field.