Terria’s platform brings together 2D and 3D  geospatial data, live feeds, analytics, and AI, enabling infrastructure owners, planners and decision-makers to model scenarios, test trade-offs, and understand the real-world impact of complex choices.

We invested in Terria because they combine deep technical heritage—born from CSIRO, Australia’s national science agency—with a clear strategy, making digital twins dramatically easier to deploy. That positioning matters as cities and states accelerate 3D capture and seek practical tools for long-term planning, resilience, and infrastructure investment.

What’s the origin story of Terria, and what inspired you to create these digital twins for the physical world?

Terria started back in 2014–15 at what was then the National ICT Australia (NICTA), later merging into the CSIRO. From day one, it was problem-led and with a global outlook, governments faced a very specific challenge of how to realise the value of the geospatial data they were producing. The blocker wasn’t a lack of data; it was that the data was fragmented and disconnected.

So our focus became: how do you bring those datasets together, make them accessible, and make them useful in one place, then turn that into an environment where analytics and AI can actually operate.

Spinning out was ultimately about scale. In CSIRO, you can invent and validate technology, but scaling it to reach its full impact is a different job. We had a proven track record, real-world deployments, and a global open-source footprint—so it was time to build a company around that capability.

Which recent breakthrough or milestone are you most proud of?

Early on, it was proving what was possible with geospatial experiences that people actually used. Our open-source version, NationalMap, reached around 20,000 visitors per month, and we built a renewable energy platform that supported a  multi-billion-dollar investment decision. After spinning out, we lost the “government halo” and warm introductions that come with it. Despite that, we won—within a consortium— Spatial WA: a $140–150 million program built around long-term strategic planning for Western Australia. For us, that was the clearest signal that Terria’s platform had moved from pioneering to critical infrastructure.

How does your platform transform how digital twins are created, and what does this mean for government and infrastructure?

Terria is B2B and B2G—our customers are governments and infrastructure organisations, not consumers. The transformation we enable is accessibility and reliability: making complex digital twin technology deployable and usable without needing a bespoke program every time, unlocking data potential and scalability.

Digital twins are essential tools because the world’s hardest challenges sit inside “invisible” systems—transport, water, emergency response, utilities, logistics. The decisions that shape those systems require multiple disciplines working together. A digital twin becomes the environment where fragmented datasets, live feeds, and specialist modelling can be combined into something observable and actionable.

Our contribution isn’t to solve transport or water modelling ourselves—it’s to provide a flexible, scalable  platform that can ingest diverse datasets and, increasingly, connect analytics and modelling from subject-matter experts. Using AI, the goal is to turn complex technical outputs into practical decision support—scenario planning at the scale governments and infrastructure owners actually need.

What are the biggest technical or regulatory challenges you face—particularly around data quality, integrity, and privacy?

The hardest technical challenge remains 3D. Bringing together 2D datasets has become easier over time, but 3D data comes with so much more complexity in file structures, ingestion pipelines, hosting costs, and refresh cycles. Real-time 3D is also hard: capturing it can require drones, aircraft, or specialised imaging, and then you still have to process, serve, and fuse it with 2D and live feeds.

These constraints are improving—AI is accelerating processing and hosting economics have shifted—but end-to-end 3D ingestion, processing, and serving at scale is still non-trivial —it’s something we’re confident in solving.

What new opportunities or markets are you most excited about in the next few years?

We’re doubling down on where we have deep credibility: government and infrastructure, particularly the pre-construction phase, where better decisions can remove enormous downstream cost.

Southeast Asia is an especially exciting opportunity. The pace of urbanisation and the scale of mega-city challenges—water, sanitation, resilience, transport—create a major opportunity for spatial digital twins as a planning layer. 

Building a hub in Singapore to support the region is a very natural next step.

What might people be surprised to learn about you or the journey of building Terria?

People are often surprised to learn that Terria has its origins in open source. Starting here showed the value our technology could bring, and our open-source library has now been independently translated into over 26 languages. 

‍