Leveraging Makepath’s Approach to Product Design and Geospatial AI to Build a Conservation Easement Monitoring Solution | GEO Week News

Sponsored by Makepath
Every company, be it a Fortune 500 industry leader or a brand new startup, has complex problems for which building out a product to solve that problem is easier said than done. Designing and building software products is challenging, and for teams and organizations that don’t have an experienced team focusing on exactly that, it’s difficult to find ways to get the exact product they need. This issue is only becoming more pronounced, too, as the data companies are working with is becoming more robust and complex, particularly as geospatial data continues to become more prominent among industries that haven’t traditionally worked with it.
It’s exactly this problem that Makepath was created to solve. The company first came together from an unlikely source, with founders Pablo Fuentes and Brendan Collins meeting within the music scene in Austin, Texas. Both had experience in the technology realm – Fuentes in product design and management, Collins in Python and data – and they recognized this problem across industries.
“I think the problem that we solve is, a lot of times people don’t have the resources internally to build these cutting-edge products,” Fuentes told Geo Week News. “We have the expertise to be able to very quickly develop turnkey products.”
A Collaborative Approach
Makepath works closely with prospective clients in the process of building out the tools these organizations require, using what they call their Discovery Package. Taking up to two months, Makepath’s team meets with users to really understand what their needs are. Fuentes tells Geo Week News that there is an art to designing software products. The key is to understand what users really need, their pain points, and how they use applications. It’s vital, he says, to figure out the most important problems and address them first, shipping a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) and then iterating from there to solve the longer list of secondary needs.
Given the tailored nature of this kind of work, with every project being very specific to the individual company and problem, no example can perfectly encapsulate what any other Makepath project will look like. However, a great example of the power this kind of offering can provide can be found within the conservation space with ORBO Systems.
Transforming Conservation Processes
ORBO started from a need within the Natural Resources Conservancy, who deal with easements on properties in rural areas, ensuring that the stipulations within these easements are being upheld. Trevor Moore, ORBO’s CEO, told Geo Week News that this process quickly became cumbersome as the organization started to take advantage of more satellite imagery and their scope began to expand beyond their starting point around Tulsa, Oklahoma. Today, the NRC works across 15 states throughout the U.S.

The NRC and ORBO source much of their satellite imagery from Planet Labs, and they were ultimately who made the first connection to Makepath, eventually forging the partnership that goes on today. Moore notes that at Planet’s user event in 2023, he and Fuentes were connected by a Planet representative at a dinner. There, he shared the problems he was having with their manual processes of going through both easement documents and satellite imagery, needing to aggregate all of this relevant information into reports for each property. This process, he says, would take months to put everything together. Moore knew this problem would be exacerbated as their scope grew and their budget as a non-profit failed to keep up, and figured there had to be a better way. That’s where Makepath came in.
“Makepath is a key partnership for us,” Moore said. “At first, this was just an idea. We’re not software designers, we’re in conservation. So what was just this idea really started to take shape once Makepath got involved.”
He continued to explain that the Makepath team came out to their office in Tulsa for a few days to go through the aforementioned discovery phase of the project, where Fuentes “really dug in” to the key problems with their current workflow and what they were looking for in a new one. Moore termed many of the conversations as “ranting ideas,” which Makepath distilled down into actionable items and a product for which it was easy to continue adding new features when applicable. Today, they are using ORBO with NRC, and are on the way out of a beta phase into an early adopter part of the build, with Makepath still involved.
The result of all of this work is a product that takes that process which Moore noted would take months and reduces that work time down to just a week or two. The product designed and built out by Makepath leverages artificial intelligence to first parse through easement documents, a complex task as Fuentes points out because these documents are often written in different styles and organized differently. After the key points are pulled out of these documents, the system then parses through the relevant medium-resolution imagery, still sourced primarily via Planet, looking for changes that could indicate violations of the easement. The end result is a significantly quicker process that catches these potential violations earlier, saving money and reducing headaches for both the property owners and the agency.
Flexible Partnerships for Various Needs
This is just one example of the kind of projects Makepath completes with their customers, who range from small organizations like Moore’s all the way up to massive corporations like Walmart. Customers can also work with Makepath as much – or as little – as they want throughout the lifecycle of this product.
“The discovery and design packages are designed to be standalone, meaning that you can take them and either build [the product] internally, or you can build it with another team,” Fuentes said. “Oftentimes, we want people to work with us but it has to feel right. So, many times we continue to build together, but sometimes people build their products internally. Sometimes people invalidate their hypotheses, saying, Hey, this is not something that I want to do right now. And it’s good they are able to do that early without spending large sums of money.”
Any organization looking to make better sense of their data and looking for ways to build solutions to solve specific, complex problems is a fit for what Makepath is doing. Describing their ideal customer, Fuentes says they are “working at the intersection of geospatial, AI, and some kind of data visualization. But really, the most important thing is they have a specific problem where they can squint and they say, Hey, I know that I have this data and that data, and I have this problem. I should be able to do this, what is the process to build a good product that solves our pain?
Want to learn more about how Makepath can solve problems your organization is facing? Come see us at Geo Week at booth #1045, or you can visit makepath.com
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