Dear , 

GeoSpock, spun-out from Cambridge University, provides a real-time scalable database for rapidly changing complex data.  The company’s ambition is to become the Google Search of Big Data.

Essentially GeoSpock’s technology platform sits at the base of an infinite number of Industry verticals which require real-time analysis of Big Data and all that confers in affiance and accuracy for any number of decision making processes. It would appear to do this in a faster more flexible and scalable way than the current market leader MongoDB.

GeoSpock provides technology solutions that help its customers fully exploit the value of their Big Data assets. It helps in two ways

• By enabling the real-time access to data that was previously “archived” and, by default, difficult to access and use
• By providing the real-time access to the explosion of dynamic data sources (e.g. Internet of Things( IoT)) regardless of scale, to support the next generation of internet applications - the third wave

Clients will be seeking to maximise (or monetise) the value of their current and future data assets.  They will wish to query and analyse all their data in as near real-time as possible, regardless of its state – archived or as live-streaming feeds coming from connected devices on the internet.  

GeoSpock’s service will enable its clients to

• Have the ability to create innovative real-time applications to meet their internal and external customer needs
• Focus on the exploitation of their data rather than creating infrastructure to manage it
• Find an alternative to data archiving
• Future-proof their data architecture to cope with an ever-increasing data avalanche

The Opportunity

GeoSpock is initially focused on solving problems in the mapping, mobile and logistics sectors, and is also well positioned to provide solutions for retail analytics and security applications.

GeoSpock’s first product, a cloud-based location database, is aimed at the $100M+ (CAGR 24%) and growing Geospatial Information Services Database as a Service (DBaaS) market. The company believes there is a demonstrated, present need in this market for more responsive, customer facing location database solutions.

The company is already working with a leading UK player in mapping and GPS services to digitize their customer offering with multiple service, license and OEM contracts in the final stage of negotiation with companies in various application verticals .

Its vision is to become the go-to search solution for complex big data, in due course extending the reach of the technology and bringing the same speed, scalability, and simplicity advantages to applications including weather modelling, facial recognition, voice recognition, and DNA sequencing for healthcare. 

The Technology

The company has developed a customized encoding mechanism and database architecture to store nearby location objects close by in the system’s memory for fast, efficient access. They also provide highly concurrent access so that many users can use the database at the same time. Further, GeoSpock is built on top of Google App Engine so is able to take advantage of that platform’s fast dynamic scaling so the service can always handle clients’ demand.

There is a programme of patent filing underway to protect the company’s IP.

This is an enabling, platform technology. The deployment of their database solution opens up new opportunities for clients to bring first-in-class location-based products and services to market including real-time data analytics performed on live and archived historical data. At large size and with dynamically changing data they can handle database queries 15x faster than existing database solutions. In their internal benchmarking the technology can service at least 10,000 requests per second with no degradation of performance, no matter how large the dataset gets.

Furthermore, GeoSpock’s database is easily integrated into clients’ existing technology solution through simple, lightweight APIs.

The Market

The database market for Big Data services is estimated to be worth $3.6Bn. MongoDB, which provides solutions utilizing noSQL databases, made $110M revenue in 2014. Early benchmarking suggests that GeoSpock’s database technology can scale to handle complex, rapidly changing data in ways the current technologies can’t support.

Further, the explosion of data collected by the Internet of Things will require scale and throughput that dwarfs current database capability. Location intelligence for mobile devices - aggregate, anonymous “trend” data—could be worth $11Bn from 2016. As IoT applications grow, current data collection and storage capabilities will be swamped.  With their ability to organize massive amounts of data and make it accessible and valuable to clients, GeoSpock is poised to be the future of big data management.

The Model

Initially, the GeoSpock database will run on top of Google App Engine to provide a fully scalable, cloud-based Database-as-a-Service offering to clients with a clear tiered pricing scheme.

Moving forward, the database technology could be taken off the cloud in order to allow clients to buy licenses to host the GeoSpock database on their own servers. This will open up more opportunities in verticals such as finance and security, where clients need to be able to keep sensitive data in house. Increases in response speeds could be achieved when running on dedicated infrastructure, by avoiding the resource contention that comes with cloud-based solutions.

In the longer term, GeoSpock aims to be an integral part of services for companies that offer data handling tools, where GeoSpock is provided as the premier solution for organizing large, dynamically changing location data. 

The Team

Steve Marsh, Founder and CEO was Cambridge University Entrepreneur's (CUE) Young Entrepreneur of the Year award winner 2012; Centre for Enterprise Development and Research (CEDAR) Fellowship winner 2012; Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship winner 2013.

Darrin Disley, Founder and NED, is CEO of Horizon Discovery Group, an international biotech company addressing the translational genomics and personalized medicine markets.  Has started, grown and/or invested in over 30 start-up companies in healthcare, IT and technology sectors, raising over $270M of business financing and closing over $400M in business development and M&A deals.

Jonathan Milner, NED, is Co-Founder and Deputy Chairman of Abcam plc, he is an experienced entrepreneur and investor.  He has provided considerable investment and support to over 30 companies and has assisted three technology companies to IPO on the London AIM Stock exchange.

The Investment Case

We share the view of the company that the current Big Data revolution, coupled with the likely explosion of data accompanying the emerging IoT industry will herald the need for GeoSpock, or something like it.  Data owners will increasingly demand the ability to interrogate their information assets and gain success from rapid innovation driven by the exploitation of this market edge.

GeoSpock are a platform technology which can be used in many different Industry verticals. Unlike the present competition its technology can access and analyse Big Data in real time, a situation which could allow them to become one of the cornerstones of the Internet of Things. Speed however is of the essence and while the technology currently appears at the forefront it will require efficient execution of the commercial plan to become the global leader in the field.

This is a technology area which is attracting significant financial and corporate investment interest with a number of publicly announced deals in the last 12 months. We believe GeoSpock has the potential to be a leader and as such an extremely valuable asset in this technology field. 

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