Energize Capital is proud to lead a $15 million investment in Felt, a collaborative, cloud-native platform that is redefining how geospatial data is visualized and applied across industries. Existing investors Footwork and Bain Capital Ventures also participated in the round. Energize’s Juan Muldoon joins the Felt board and Anson MacKinney joins as a board observer. This investment marks Energize’s first in geospatial software—an area where we’ve long recognized the outsized influence of mapping and spatial analytics in accelerating the energy transition.
Geospatial analytics is foundational to how we plan, build, and manage physical infrastructure—especially in climate industries, where grid planning, renewable development, climate resilience, and more depend on accurate spatial data. In recent years, this sector has exploded to a $9 billion market, driven by an influx of new data sources from drones, satellites, and IoT sensors. Today, over thirteen industries rely on GIS insights for core operations across energy and utilities to transportation, construction, and natural resources.
Yet despite the scale of its impact, the GIS software market has seen limited innovation since the 1980s. The dominant tools in the space—like ESRI’s ArcGIS—were designed for a previous generation of highly technical users, often operating as in-house experts or specialized consultants to develop complex, siloed tools. These legacy systems have failed to modernize with today’s era of complex data sources, cross-functional collaboration, and cloud-first expectations. Today’s customer is no longer satisfied with the costs or limitations of legacy solutions, looking instead for user-friendly solutions that can keep up with massive new data loads, diversifying use cases, and tightening margins.
Enter Felt. Founded in 2021, Felt is a cloud-native, collaborative GIS platform designed to bring spatial data into the modern enterprise. Unlike traditional GIS software, Felt is cloud-native, highly collaborative, and accessible to a broader set of users—enabling energy developers, urban planners, government agencies, and climate researchers to work together, in real time, on the same map.
Felt’s product suite includes both intuitive map-making and powerful APIs, enabling integrations with upstream and downstream systems. Their latest product release, Felt AI, is a major step in their mission to democratize GIS software: it’s a no-code map-building tool that allows anyone to create spatial applications using only natural language prompts.
Felt’s use cases span high-impact sectors across renewables, disaster response, logistics, real estate, government, and more. Solar developer Arevon uses Felt to evaluate and communicate project siting, while fire prevention teams from Northern Arizona University have used Felt to analyze wildfire risk—saving over $200,000 in consulting fees and accelerating their mitigation planning. Whether it’s sales teams visualizing logistics in real estate or governments tracking road closures and hazard zones, Felt makes spatial data both shareable and actionable across organizations it a way it has never been before.
At Energize, we invest in digital solutions that accelerate the energy transition. This massive transformation presents the repeated challenging of planning, monitoring, and optimizing physical assets—from renewables to EV charging infrastructure. Felt’s solution is a key enabler to these initiatives, harnessing the benefits of spatial intelligence to quickly and effectively improve workflows and improve the deployment of essential infrastructure.
Felt was co-founded by Sam Hashemi and Rachel Zack, both veterans of the urban mobility platform Remix. Sam, a designer and second-time founder, sold Remix to Via for $100M after a career designing new interfaces for NASA missions, including the Mars Curiosity rover. Rachel brings deep policy and climate experience, having led policy strategy at Remix and worked across local government and transportation planning.
Their shared frustration with the limitations of traditional GIS tools at Remix led them to start Felt. Drawing from their complementary backgrounds, Sam and Rachel set out to build the intuitive geospatial platform they wished they’d had—a tool built not just for specialists, but for everyone involved in planning the physical world.
Today, Felt is based in the Bay Area, serving customers across the globe. Their team has now grown to over 20 people, and they continue to hire across functions. For more information on job openings, see their job board here.
With this new funding, Felt will continue building out its AI capabilities and expanding its analytics suite—bringing more advanced spatial intelligence to the teams shaping our energy and infrastructure future. Energize is thrilled to support Felt as they redefine what modern mapping can do.
