Spexi Geospatial is launching the LayerDrone Foundation and its decentralized network aimed at encouraging a community of amateur drone pilots to capture ultra-high resolution Earth imagery.

Launched a year ago, Spexi said its reward-driven pilots have captured over 10 million images across 2.3 million acres of Earth, and now it’s going to further incentivize them through the LayerDrone Network, a decentralized network that can enable next-generation spatial AI applications ranging from disaster response to autonomous vehicle training.

“We set out to create a new drone platform to socialize drone pilots,” said Bill Lakeland, CEO of Spexi, in an interview with GamesBeat. “We incentivize them with this novel model to capture data for us in an automated way. It makes it fast and easy for drone pilots to capture cities all over the world, very quickly at 900 times more resolution than we get from satellites and significantly more than we get from aircraft at a much faster cadence.”

On top of that, he believes it will be 50 times more cost effective than other methods like downward-pointing airplane cameras or satellite imaging.

Alec Wilson, COO of Spexi, added in an interview with GamesBeat, “It’s the largest standardized drone imaging network on Earth with over 100,000 missions flown of drones capturing standardized imagery across the largest cities in North America. We have captured entire cities using off-the-shelf drones. We are hitting the gas pedal on capturing imagery all over North America and launching the spinout of the LayerDrone Foundation.”

In the past year, Spexi has given out more than $1 million in drone pilot rewards, And now it’s going to get help from a decentralized crypto strategy. There are thousands of drone pilots participating, and there are 5,000 people in the company’s Discord channel.

The timing of this launch coincides with a critical juncture where the need for high-resolution spatial data has never been more urgent, as AI and autonomous systems increasingly require precise visual understanding of our physical world.

“The technology stack that we’ve built over our years of experience and knowledge in the space makes it dead simple to collect imagery at scale in a gamified way,” Lakeland said. “You can think of it like Pokemon Go at Niantic Labs in terms of data capture mapping all over the world. We’re kind of a little bit more literal, where we’re actually flying drones, but it’s fun and easy for pilots to onboard and fly cities very quickly.”

The pilots have mapped about 170 cities in North America. The company issues missions and the drone operators claim them, mapping an area about 25 acres in size by flying their drones at a pre-arranged height to capture the features on the ground. A pilot can make around $50 a flight, and more than 100,000 missions have been flown so far.

The LayerDrone Network

Spexi is still the core tech provider for the Earth data, but now it will spin out a blockchain foundation that the drone pilots themselves can govern.

The LayerDrone Network’s launch represents a significant evolution in Earth imaging technology, moving from a centralized commercial model to an open network protocol where anyone can contribute or build applications. This structure enables true decentralization, community governance, and the standardization needed to power next-generation spatial AI applications ranging from disaster response to autonomous vehicle training.

Spatial AI represents a fundamental shift in how artificial intelligence interacts with our world. Unlike traditional AI systems that process text, images, or structured data in isolation, spatial AI understands the three-dimensional relationships between objects and can reason about physical spaces the way humans do. This technology requires vastly more detailed imagery than what’s currently available from satellites.

Spexi Geospatial, which developed the underlying technology LayerDrone uses, will continue as the network’s founding core contributor, providing applications that interface with the LayerDrone Network while operating as a separate commercial entity.

“Building AI systems that truly understand and navigate the real world means training them on data that captures the environment with human-level nuance,” said Lakeland. “When self-driving cars need to tell the difference between a shadow and a pothole, or disaster crews must detect fine cracks in a compromised bridge, centimeter-level resolution isn’t a luxury, it’s essential.”

He added, “Use cases like these are growing at an unprecedented pace, and unlocking their potential starts with the kind of precise data foundation LayerDrone provides.”

Key highlights

The LayerDrone Network includes:

Unmatched detail: Imagery up to 1cm resolution—900x more detailed than satellites

Decentralized approach: Network of drone pilots around the world capture standardized data while earning rewards

Proven traction: Already imaged 2.3M+ acres across 160+ cities in North America and Europe in ultra-high resolutions of 2.8cm or better.

Environmental Social and Governance (ESG) friendly: Produces 97% less carbon emissions than satellite and aircraft alternatives.

Emerging markets: Markets and Markets projects the geospatial analytics market to grow to $147.6 billion by 2028, while Mordor Intelligence expects the spatial computing market to reach $152.2 billion by 2028. Forbes Business Insights estimates the aerial imaging market to reach $190 billion by 2030.

Powered by a token

The company has raised $17 million so far and it has a team of 34 people. To step on the gas pedal, the company decided to spin out the Web3 tech and the blockchain technology from Spexi into the LayerDrone Foundation to advance the common good. The foundation, which will be governed by token holders, will launch a crypto token to incentivize capture through the network and Spexi.

“It will be crypto-powered drone imagery at scale, and we believe this will be the new standard for high-resolution imaging on the planet. You can spin it up very quickly in any anywhere in the world where people have drones, which is basically everywhere,” Wilson said. “And through our system that we’ve built, the software standardizes that process. You don’t have to fly a plane to Africa or to Brazil or to London or to New York or to Japan. You simply just need to start introducing the software to people that own drones. They download the applications, and then they go capture the earth.”

To pump up its impact, the foundation will introduce a utility token to power the network, enabling pilot incentives, governance participation, and network access features.

As for the token launch, Lakeland said he was well aware that many tokens get hyped, launch like a rocket, and then fall back down to Earth as speculators dump the tokens. After a couple of years of watching that happen, Spexi and the foundation are just starting the token launch plans.

With the right incentives in place, the tokens may take be more sustainable, Lakeland said. Some of the rules may be loosened by the Trump administration, which is crypto friendly, but Wilson said, “LayerDrone has plans to launch this token when it makes sense for its business model and Spexi.”

A crowdsourced future

“The LayerDrone Foundation creates the governance structure needed to scale a truly decentralized Earth imagery network,” said Wilson. “Similar to how open internet protocols enabled the explosion of web applications, LayerDrone’s open protocol will create the conditions for massive innovation in spatial AI—and countless other applications that can leverage drone-quality imagery at these unprecedented scales.”

In some ways, this is not so different than Niantic’s Pokemon Go. It turns out that getting lots of gamers to walk around the globe and map location and routes is a good way to crowdsource location data. The difference is that Pokemon Go uses a game to crowdsource the data collection, while LayerDrone uses hobbyist pilots navigating drones in the air to capture its data.

LayerDrone is the foundation for spatial AI. It’s a mission-driven organization dedicated to developing and maintaining Earth’s most valuable imagery resource.

Ultimately, the data from Spexi and the LayerDrone Foundation could enable better real-world gaming, metaverse, urban planning, emergency response and autonomous vehicle applications.

This will help metaverse applications understand the physical world around us and help other businesses profit from a precise understanding of world, one city block at a time.

Bigger than a flying game

Lakeland said drone imagery is better than satellites (about 30-centimeter accuracy) because it’s faster at capturing high-res images at a level where you can still discern 3D landscapes on the ground without flying so low that you violate privacy norms by capturing the faces of people or license plates. Lakeland said the accuracy is still about three-centimeters in accuracy.

The Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 team told me they had to use satellite, airplane camera data and whatever else they could get their hands on to make the details on the ground of the game’s maps richer — with about 4,000 times more detail on the ground than the 2020 game. Even with that, the game had no more than 1,000 different biomes where you could land planes or gliders on the planet. That’s not the entire planet.

To build a large geospatial model, you need really good reference material, and you need really accurate base information to build on top of it. Spexi collects data that can be registered, meaning you can connect the different patches of ground that each drone captures and connect them. And since drones can capture at a slight angle, they can capture the facades of buildings, which is very important for metaverse applications that are trying to reconstruct cities.

To stitch the overlaps, the drone data can create point clouds through a process called photogrammetry, which is harder to do with satellite data. And from that point cloud, Spexi can generate what is called a Gaussian Splat. Companies take these splats to build a photorealistic 3D model of a scene, capturing the shape of buildings, trees and ground features that is much more like native imagery.

“You need very dense points on facades, buildings and things like that, which just exponentially increases the value of of what it is that we’re collecting,” Lakeland said.

Wilson added, “You can see how the recreation of this imagery, using this technique, starts to create incredibly detailed and photorealistic digital twins.”

On a map of the world, I could see hexagons over various cities which showed the areas that had been already mapped in places like San Francisco and those that still had to be captured. Wilson said the drone pilots fly in accordance with FAA regulations with appropriate licenses. The drones are “micro drones” that weigh less than 250 grams and they can fly up 260 feet in the air, where people can’t hear them.

Perhaps two or three pilots could cover a town in a day. At this rate of capture, I said I doubted whether capture of the entire Earth would ever get done. But the Spexi guys said the point wasn’t necessary to capture every spot on the planet. Rather, it was first to capture the places that customers need to capture. And Lakeland said you should never underestimate the passion for drone pilots to capture data.