Technology
Spatial infrastructure, rebuilt from first principles.
How we think about the pipeline behind physical-world data, from the codecs to the applications built on them, and how we ship the result.
Philosophy
The rails spatial data runs on were laid for hardware that no longer exists.
Generic compressors treat scientific rasters like text files. Image codecs are designed for photographs and squeak by on telemetry. Even the scientific codecs that do exist were designed in an era when "compression performance" meant single-threaded scalar throughput on a 32-bit CPU. The geospatial tools that convert and reproject that data were built on top of them, and inherited the same assumptions.
We rebuild from the bottom up. Predictive coding driven by per-region adaptive selection. Tiled execution that fits L1 cache. SIMD as the foundation, not an optimization. Bit-exact guarantees across every backend. The result is a shared engineering substrate that products plug into, each occupying its own strategic position.
Products
Ten codecs. One suite.
A new codec
When you control both the writer and the reader, RIPT delivers better compression on prediction-friendly data and dramatic gains in lossy modes. New format. New decompressor. Higher ceiling.
A new codec, volumetric
One native codec for the two formats 3D actually ships in: lidar point clouds and Gaussian splats. Lossless files smaller than the incumbents' lossy ones, decoded at GPU speed everywhere. New format. Higher ceiling.
The eight drop-ins: keep your format, swap the backend
The same LERC files, v1 to v6; 2.80× faster writes, 1.74× faster reads.
Memory-safe WebP that removes the CVE-2023-4863 risk class; 2.9× faster encode at defaults.
JPEG XL for 8, 16 and 32-bit map tiles; 1.8×–4.5× faster writes, 3.5×–5.0× faster reads per core.
TIFF LZW, plugged into libtiff; 2.10× faster reads on real imagery, no code changes.
LZ4 block and frame; reads faster at every setting, 1.38× at high-compression level 1, same size.
Zstandard; faster reads at every level, 3.65× faster archival writes.
Point-cloud LEPCC, byte for byte; 14.4× faster bulk encode.
3D Gaussian splats; 4–7× faster writes, or smaller files still 1.6× faster.
RIPT raises the ceiling for new deployments; the eight Track B drop-ins remove the floor for existing pipelines: keep your format, swap the backend. Ten codecs, one vendor. See the suite overview.
Applications
Spatial Engine.
The first of many applications.
The codecs are the foundation. Spatial Engine is the first rail laid on them, and the line gets longer with every release. Built on our codecs instead of the libraries GDAL links, it writes the same files GDAL does, faster and in a fraction of the memory.
A geospatial engine
Write once
Convert
Satellite, aerial, radar and elevation imagery into cloud-ready files: compressed, tiled, with previews built in the same pass.
Reproject and write
Re-map every pixel onto a common grid and write the new file, so layers from sources in different projections line up. 4.44× faster than GDAL on Windows, like for like.
Read forever
Read
Get the pixels back out of a file, as every map, model and tile server does. 2.85–3.39× faster than GDAL on every core, same pixels.
Read and reproject
Read a file straight onto the map grid you need, with nothing written. 2.75–4.29× faster than GDAL on every core.
Same files: GeoTIFF, COG, MRF and BigTIFF, readable by everything that reads GDAL's output. One command-line engine, macOS and Windows.
See Spatial Engine and the benchmarks →Engineering Substrate
One dispatch layer.
Every modern vector ISA.
Both products share the same SIMD dispatch architecture. The codec algorithm is defined once at the algorithmic level and mapped to the widest available vector unit at runtime. Adding a new backend is a mapping exercise, not a rewrite. Output is bit-exact identical regardless of which backend ran.
Platform matrix
All backends produce bit-exact identical output. Auto-detection at runtime; portable scalar fallback for any CPU.
How We Ship
Compiled binaries.
Developer Hub.
Every platform
Encoders and decoders for RIPT, LERC and the rest of the suite come from the Developer Hub as compiled binaries for every supported platform.
Commercial licenses
Production use requires a paid license. Per-seat, per-transaction, OEM, and enterprise tiers. See the pricing page for the full set.
No source distribution
Even paid licensees receive compiled binaries, not source. Compiled-only is part of our IP defensibility: patents pending, plus the algorithm never ships in readable form.