Carto (company)

CARTO (formerly CartoDB) is a software as a service (SaaS) cloud computing platform that provides GIS, web mapping, data visualization, spatial analytics, and spatial data science features. The company is positioned as a Location Intelligence platform due to its tools for geospatial data analysis and visualization that do not require advanced GIS or development experience. As a cloud-native platform, CARTO overcomes any previous limits on data scale for spatial workloads.

Data Scientists, Developers, and Data Analysts leverage CARTO to streamline business operations and predict potential outcomes through the application of Spatial Data Science methodologies.

CARTO stands out as a cloud-first geospatial platform explicitly developed for accelerated and contemporary Geographic Information Systems (GIS). It seamlessly operates on diverse cloud data warehouse platforms like Google BigQuery, Snowflake, AWS Redshift, Databricks, among others. This enables convenient access to scalable spatial analysis and data visualization in the cloud, streamlining spatial analytics, application development, data engineering, and related workloads. CARTO is accessible as both a cloud-based SaaS offering or a self-hosted deployment for enterprises wishing to run CARTO on their own private infrastructure.

CARTO was initially released in Beta at FOSS4G in Denver in September 2011, and officially debuted as a final release at Where2.0 in April 2012. Since 2014, CARTO is a company independent from Vizzuality. The Spanish start-up raised $7 million from a consortium of investors in September 2014. In September 2015, CARTO received a $23 million in Series B financing. In May 2019, CARTO acquired Geographica, in an effort to boost their professional services offering. In 2021, CARTO raised $61 million in series C financing, with Insight Partners leading the round.