Indigo leverages cutting-edge science and technology to create solutions that benefit both farmers and the environment. The company supports more than 29 million acres through their sustainability solution field enrollment, biological product application and joint venture Grow Indigo – generating tens of millions in revenue for farmers to date.The company's geospatial team plays a critical role in delivering spatial intelligence across the organization, from visualizing carbon sequestration opportunities to enabling sales teams to demonstrate program impact to potential partners.
When Ian Bachman-Sanders and Jacob McDonald evaluated their geospatial infrastructure, they were drowning in custom development work. Each visualization request from sales, product, or operations teams meant weeks of engineering time. "We kept coming up against this wall of scalability," explains Ian. They had built an internal mapping application on Mapbox meant for one specific purpose, but end users constantly wanted to do more.
The team ended up building more and more features to accommodate these requests instead of focusing on new work. A biological co-benefit analysis took two weeks of development. Water stress correlation maps sat backlogged. In another instance, building a sales enablement tool consumed 12+ person-hours across multiple engineers during a hackathon just to create a prototype.
Meanwhile, their CARTO license was straining budgets while still requiring engineers to know "the right incantation" to create even basic visualizations. With their vision that "any person who can use Excel should be able to make a map," they needed a platform that could scale without consuming their entire engineering team's bandwidth.
From the first pilot, Indigo's team knew Felt was different. “We were used to spatial analysis being a tedious, multi-step process that could take hours. The fact that you could go from spreadsheet to map in minutes with Felt stood out to me right away,” shared Ian.
Felt’s modern GIS platform met all their vector and raster needs and made it easy to build dashboards and apps. Through direct connections to their AWS infrastructure—including Snowflake for their data warehouse, processed imagery stored in Amazon S3, and AWS Batch for their Python and Rust compute pipelines—Indigo unified their fragmented geospatial stack.
The AWS Marketplace streamlined procurement, allowing them to utilize their existing AWS EDP budget while consolidating vendor management. The platform went from pilot to production rapidly, with the team building carbon inventory maps that their entire sales team now uses to demonstrate opportunities to partners and embed directly on their public website.
After implementing Felt, Indigo experienced a transformation in how location intelligence powers their business:
"The speedup from moving to Felt is very obvious," notes Ian. More importantly, the engineering team reclaimed hundreds of hours per year previously spent on custom development. The sales team of 10+ people now independently shares interactive maps with partners and potential customers. Looking ahead, with Felt's upcoming AI SQL capabilities, the team envisions product managers and data scientists creating their own visualizations without any engineering support—finally achieving their goal of true self-service mapping.
