Azavea is an award-winning geospatial software engineering company based in Philadelphia. The firm was organized in 2000 to create technologically advanced solutions for web and mobile geospatial data visualization and analysis. Azavea is a certified B Corporation (http://www.bcorporation.net), a for-profit corporation with a social mission: to apply geospatial technology to create more sustainable, vital and livable communities while advancing the state-of-the-art through research.

The Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program has supported this mission and played an important role in Azavea’s continuing growth and success. Since winning its first Phase I grant in 2006, Azavea’s total revenue has grown from $711,183 in 2005 to $2.9 million in 2012. Full-time staff has increased from seven individuals in 2005 to thirty-five individuals in January 2013.

Under the direction of founder and Principal Investigator Robert Cheetham, Azavea has won three Phase II awards, and one Phase IIB award. Two of the Phase II awards have come from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) for work related to data management, modeling, simulation and visualization of urban forestry data. A third Phase II award was from the National Science Foundation for development of HunchLab, an advanced software tool for crime visualization, forecasting and early warning.

These diverse awards share a single common objective: to bring complex geographic data analysis and visualization capabilities to a much broader and less technical audience through advances in high performance computing, statistical analysis and user interface design. Each SBIR has focused on either a specific vertical market (law enforcement, urban forestry) or on specific technology advances, such as using GPUs to increase geospatial data processing performance. This reflects the founder’s firm and ongoing commitment to the idea that visualizing geographic phenomena benefits not only from an ability to bring more of the real world into the classroom, workplace, or lab, but also from a complementary ability to take more of the classroom, workplace, or lab into the real world where people live, work, and spend most of their time. The web and mobile software developed with SBIR funding have therefore been designed to work equally well wherever an Internet connection is available: on a standalone desktop in a student’s dorm room, on a networked computer in a high-rise office building, or even on a laptop in the neighborhood coffee house.

Azavea’s SBIR projects have resulted in products and services that have enabled the firm to break out of its original Philadelphia regional marketplace to compete for and win clients across the United States, Canada, and Western Europe. There are plans to extend this market reach into Africa, the Middle East, and the Pacific Rim by the end of 2014. The high profile and prestige associated with federal research has also led to research collaborations with several major universities that are enabling Azavea to continue advancing the state-of-the-art outside the context of the SBIR program.