TerraQuanta's Wang Chi: Building a Digital Holographic Earth with AI + Remote Sensing

TerraQuanta's Wang Chi: Building a Digital Holographic Earth with AI + Remote Sensing

Satellite remote sensing technology, which emerged in the 1960s, is now at work in fields such as grain monitoring, water distribution, and flood disasters. Since 2013, scholars in China and abroad have begun using deep learning for intelligent remote sensing interpretation research, and AI has gradually become an important direction in remote sensing data processing. ^[1]

Wang Chi, founder and CEO of TerraQuanta, sums up the company's direction as "subscription-based digital Earth PaaS services." Its ultimate vision is to build a holographic Earth that records the past, observes the present, and predicts the future. Wang Chi said that what he originally wanted to build when starting the company was "a search engine for the physical world," in a form resembling a holographically projected digital Earth. ^[1]

The report noted that TerraQuanta was included in the "Global Machine Learning Earth Observation Market Map" published by the U.S. nonprofit Radiant Earth Foundation for two consecutive years, in 2020 and 2021; in 2020, it was the only Chinese company on that map. ^[1]

In Wang Chi's view, the development of remote sensing satellite technology depends on the development of the commercial space sector, and current data consists mainly of open-source satellite and commercial satellite data. This is also a globalized market that faces global competition, but the core competition remains in technical data processing and extraction. Industry technological progress is closely tied to GPUs, the metaverse, and AI technology. ^[1]

On the financing side, evidence shows TerraQuanta's funding status as Series A+ (January 2021), with a Series A round of 50 million RMB (November 2020); major investors include Orchid Asia, SIG Asia, and Shunwei Capital. ^[1]

Looking at this case, the key to AI + remote sensing is not only acquiring satellite imagery, but also completing intelligent interpretation through methods such as deep learning, and combining data updates, platform services, and industry applications. The "holographic Earth" described by Wang Chi is essentially about turning the Earth's past, present, and future states into queryable, predictable data services. ^[1]