Cyvl.ai, a hardware-enabled software company, is on a mission to transform infrastructure management in the United States. "We work with government and civil engineering firms to automate the assessment of roadways and infrastructure," explains Dan McCarthy, Head of Product at Cyvl.
To do this, Cyvl collects terabytes of sensor and LiDAR data on the state of the roadway before analyzing it with a proprietary algorithm. The Product and Engineering teams view the results and may adjust the algorithm based on what they are seeing. Before Felt, there was no easy way to do this. “When we launched the internal feature with QGIS, it was immediately clear it would not scale – we needed to move faster. We started searching for alternatives,” says Dan.
The solution came when the Cyvl team discovered Felt at an Esri conference. "What was different about Felt is that I could use it right away," Dan recalls. Cyvl.ai scans millions of miles of roadway producing a massive amount of data. With multiple large datasets to visualize, Felt’s performance and collaborative features proved particularly valuable. "The ability to work together on one performant map is huge," Dan emphasizes, "it was the perfect way to track, check when we had an anomaly in the algorithmic results and have all the technical experts dig into it together."
The impact of implementing Felt has been substantial across the organization. "Our GIS analysts and engineers got 20% of their time back when we switched to Felt, and that is huge,'" Dan shares. The platform has become integral to various teams, from engineering to marketing, with different departments accessing it every few weeks.
The intuitiveness of Felt has accelerated the work of the go-to-market team. “Geospatial data is the core of our business, and Felt makes it easy for our Marketers and Customer Success Managers to work with spatial data. We want our whole team playing around with it whether or not they are technical."
For other product leaders considering Felt, Dan emphasizes its unique value: "Felt’s ease-of-use makes it possible for our go-to-market team to jump in and experience the spatial thinking of our customers. That’s not possible with legacy GIS tools. And for a spatial company, that’s gold."
