Cartos · Phase III — Defined
Not one app — a platform for standing up bespoke field apps from common pieces. Admins define layers, schemas, and forms in a web console; field workers run them in a native app that works offline and syncs into the Cartos data fabric. The sovereign ground-truth edge of the platform.
The thesis
Phases I–II serve the analyst — someone at a desk reasoning over imagery. But the picture is only as good as the ground truth feeding it. Today that ground truth is collected in disconnected tools that don't feed a sovereign AI platform, don't close the loop back to change detection or 3D, and aren't sovereign.
Phase I–II sells analyst seats — tens to low-hundreds per organisation. Phase III sells field seats — hundreds to thousands — plus entry into two large, fast-growing adjacent markets: field data collection and reality capture.
Product decision
The web can't reach LiDAR/ARKit, ARCore depth, or robust iOS background sync — so the field app is cross-platform native, while the admin/app-builder console is web.
| Option | Verdict | Why |
|---|---|---|
| HTML5 / PWA as field app | Companion only | No access to Apple LiDAR/ARKit or ARCore depth from web; weaker offline + background sync on iOS. Ideal for a light viewer and the admin console. |
| Fully native (Swift + Kotlin) | Overkill for v1 | Best device access, but two codebases double the cost — not justified until scale demands it. |
| Cross-platform native (Flutter / RN) | Recommended | One codebase across iOS + Android, near-native offline & performance, mature map/storage plugins; native modules added for LiDAR, GNSS/RTK. |
Architecture fit
Captured features land in the data fabric as lineage-tracked observed datasets — joining the same derived-data graph, change detection, and 3D pipeline the analysts already use.
Release scope
Offline capture with deferred sync is the normal case for field work, so it's v1 — the app fails its core job otherwise. Advanced offline and reality capture follow.
Market sizing
Market anchors from public 2025–26 industry reports. Treat the TAM/SAM/SOM model as illustrative and assumption-driven, not a forecast.
Competitive landscape
Every serious tool does offline capture, forms, geometry, and photos. None is sovereign, inside an integrated GeoAI + owned-imagery platform, closing the loop from field to AI. That intersection is the entire opening.
| Capability | Esri suite | Fulcrum | QField / Mergin | Trimble | Cartos Field |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Offline capture & sync | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Configurable bespoke apps | ✓ | ✓✓ | partial | ✓ | ✓ |
| High-accuracy GNSS / RTK | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓✓ | v2 |
| Sovereign / in-territory | ✗ | ✗ | self-host | ✗ | ✓ core |
| Integrated GeoAI + owned imagery | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ |
| Field → AI loop (change / 3D / graph) | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ |
| In-field 3D / 4D reality capture | partial | ✗ | ✗ | partial | v2/v3 |
| Auditable lineage to analytics | partial | partial | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ |
| Market presence / maturity | ✓✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | early |
“Everyone else sells a field tool. Cartos Field is the sovereign ground-truth edge of an AI geospatial platform — for buyers who can't put their field data in someone else's cloud and want it to come back as intelligence.”
Go-to-market
| # | Priority segment | Why it fits |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Utilities & critical infrastructure | Inspection, asset capture, outage/change verification — high seat counts, sovereignty-sensitive. |
| 2 | Government & defence | Field ISR, asset/border survey, digital-twin programs — sovereignty is a hard requirement. |
| 3 | Construction & site | Progress capture, as-built, 3D from the field. |
| 4 | Environment & compliance | Monitoring, sampling, geotagged evidence. |
| 5 | Telecom | FTTx and tower/site survey. |
| Success metric | Target signal |
|---|---|
| Field seats per account | Order-of-magnitude above analyst seats |
| Offline reliability | Zero data-loss incidents in pilots |
| Time-to-stand-up a bespoke app | Hours in the console, not a dev cycle |
| Field data → derived graph | % of captures reused by analysts / models |
| Survey-grade attach rate | Accounts adding external GNSS / RTK |
Design partner program
Utilities, gov/defence, construction, environment, telecom — if your field data can't live in someone else's cloud, let's talk. Engagements run under NDA.