Senior Software Engineer

Spexi orthomosaic drone imagery now available on the SkyWatch platform. KITCHENER, ON, February 17, 2026 (Newswire.com) - SkyWatch today announced that Spexi's high-precision orthomosaic drone imagery is now available directly through the SkyWatch platform, giving customers seamless access to ultra-high-resolution, standardized drone data for mapping, measurement, and regional analysis. With this initial launch, SkyWatch users can access Spexi's stitched, orthorectified top-down orthomosaic imagery across North America purpose-built for overlays, planning, and geospatial workflows, through SkyWatch's EXPLORE and HUB applications and API. The integration offers a high temporal and spatial resolution supplement to traditional capture methods, enabling organizations to operationalize hyper-local drone datasets to augment existing data. The total available dataset is expected to scale to hundreds of cities by the end of 2026. Developed by Spexi's in-house team of engineers, the company's orthomosaics capture 2.8 cm GSD ultra-high-resolution top-down views that are fully calibrated, standardized, and ready for rapid ingestion into analytics and modeling pipelines. Customers rely on Spexi data for a wide range of use cases, including powering physical AI, large geospatial model training, infrastructure monitoring, land-use planning, insurance assessment, and energy and utilities analysis. "Making Spexi's orthomosaic imagery available on SkyWatch dramatically lowers the friction of accessing ultra-high-resolution drone data," said Bill Lakeland, CEO of Spexi. "Spexi has always focused on transforming drone imagery collection into easy-to-use data products. Now customers can programmatically request pinpoint coverage through SkyWatch and integrate it instantly into their workflows." The addition of Spexi's data further strengthens SkyWatch's role as a unified access layer for Earth observation data, bringing together satellite, aerial, and now standardized drone imagery through a single commercial and technical interface. "SkyWatch is built to remove barriers between organizations and the data they need to make decisions," said James Slifierz, CEO and Co-Founder of SkyWatch. "By adding Spexi's orthomosaic drone imagery to our platform, we're giving customers a powerful new way to capture fine-grained, decision-grade detail and integrate it seamlessly into their geospatial and analytics environments." SkyWatch is offering premium pricing on Spexi orthomosaic imagery to select customers. Contact SkyWatch for additional details. Additional Spexi products, such as standard multi-view imagery, oblique imagery, and 360-degree panoramas, may be made available on the SkyWatch platform in future phases. Visit our website to learn more. About Spexi Spexi is a Vancouver-based technology company revolutionizing Earth imagery through its global network of drone pilots. By utilizing automated drone systems and cutting-edge software, Spexi delivers ultra-high-resolution aerial imagery that is 10x higher resolution than the best satellites, as detailed as 2.8 centimeters per pixel and in areas as small as 25 acres. This imagery supports organizations and companies in disaster preparedness, smart city planning, infrastructure inspection, resource monitoring, gaming, and countless other AI applications. Spexi has raised $20.5M USD from investors, including Blockchange Ventures, FJ Labs, Protocol Labs, Moonshots Capital, and Alliance. Visit Spexi.com to learn more. About SkyWatch SkyWatch is on a mission to make Earth observation data accessible to the world. Through its unified platform, SkyWatch connects organizations and developers to satellite, aerial, and drone imagery, simplifying data discovery, acquisition, and integration across geospatial, analytics, and decision-making workflows.

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.”Spexi is launching a blockchain foundation dubbed 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