A precise understanding of the built environment is now a prerequisite for decisions across countless industries — and building footprints, the location and dimensions of structures, are the heart of it. Over a decade of delivering footprints at national scale, we have learned exactly where the work goes wrong, and how to get it right.
Why national-scale footprints are hard
Compiling a complete, accurate building dataset for an entire country is genuinely difficult. The biggest pitfall is completeness: most high-value enterprise applications need a full inventory of every building in the area of interest, yet many commercial footprint databases are incomplete — a by-product of how they were generated.
Our approach
By extracting footprints directly from high-resolution imagery with AI, we build coverage that is both complete and consistent — continent-scale where it is needed, structure by structure. That completeness is what turns building data into dependable shared infrastructure for planning, insurance, logistics and emergency response.
