When Rob Agee, Chief Operating Officer at Vexcel, first got into mapping twenty-five years ago, a state-of-the-art map was a printed sheet of turn-by-turn directions from the airport to your hotel. Today, he runs the business side of Vexcel, a company whose aerial cameras can resolve individual roof vents and stacked pallets behind a warehouse, and by 2027, that level of detail will be available for every corner of the United States, not just its cities.
From Paper Maps to Virtual Earth
The path from paper maps to that milestone wasn’t a straight line. Agee spent his early career at Microsoft’s Map Point unit, where by the mid-2000s the team was building Virtual Earth, a rival to the then-fledgling Google Earth. The problem, as he remembers it, was sourcing: imagery came from a patchwork of licensors, with no single reliable pipeline. So, in 2006, Microsoft bought Vexcel outright, a small company that was building aerial sensors at the time. Agee went with it, running the team through a decade under Microsoft’s roof. When Microsoft decided in 2016 it no longer wanted to be in the camera business, Vexcel spun out on its own and has been quietly doubling down on resolution ever since.
The numbers tell the story of that patience. Nationwide collection started at 30 centimeter resolution back in 2010, a figure satellites couldn’t touch at the time. By 2018, the resolution had improved to 20 centimeters and then to 15 centimeters a few years later. Now Vexcel is pushing to seven and a half centimeters, a jump that quadruples the pixel density per square meter compared to the previous resolution.
“It’s not a marginal gain,” Rob says. “It’s a step function change.”
Erasing the Line Between Urban and Rural
What that actually means on the ground is a matter of scale. Details that used to require a premium, city-only imagery product, like the condition of a roof, the layout of power lines, and the features of a single property, are becoming visible everywhere, not just in the top metro areas Vexcel has long prioritized.
For years, the company ran two separate tiers: a high-resolution urban tier covering roughly 90% of the population and a coarser wide-area tier for everything else. The 2027 rollout effectively erases that line. Rural counties will see the same fidelity as dense cities, with the one exception being the oblique, building-side imagery that’s remained an urban-only feature.
Agee doesn’t see the rollout as benefiting one industry in particular. A utility company checking vegetation growth near its power lines, an insurer assessing roof condition after a storm, a solar installer scouting rooftops, a tax assessor tracking new construction – all of them, he argues, get more to work with once every part of the country is imaged at the same resolution.
That last group, consisting of the tax assessors, the auditors, and the analysts point to where this technology intersects with something newer: artificial intelligence. Vexcel’s data, Agee is quick to note, wasn’t retrofitted for AI; it was built for computer vision from the start, which means two decades of historical imagery can be reprocessed rather than recaptured. Layered with the company’s new Vexcel Intelligence platform, that history becomes something closer to a searchable archive of the physical world. Ask it to find a Tudor-style house near a pond with a willow tree, and it can look nationwide. Ask what’s changed in a county over the last year, and it can flag a new pool, a deck, or an accessory dwelling unit without a human ever having to eyeball a satellite photo.
It’s the kind of capability that’s fueling a term Agee hears constantly these days: GeoAI. He describes it less as a new product category and more as a quiet expansion of who counts as a geospatial user. Plenty of people asking questions online have an implicit location baked into what they want to know, whether or not they’d describe themselves as working in mapping or GIS. As foundational AI models get better at handling that hidden spatial dimension, Agee thinks the audience for this kind of imagery data will keep growing well past the specialists who’ve traditionally been Vexcel’s customers.
How the Rollout Will Unfold
For now, the rollout itself will unfold gradually. Starting in January, collection will move south to north, chasing sun angle and snowmelt the way aerial surveys always have. Populated areas like entire counties and cities, plus their surrounding regions, come first, both for commercial reasons and to avoid leaving gaps mid-region. Remote, sparsely populated places, the Grand Canyon among them, will wait until later in the cycle.
Twenty years after joining a company that was, at the time, just another camera manufacturer trying to solve Microsoft’s imagery problem, Rob Agee is watching that slow accumulation of investment turn into something like a complete picture of the country. One where, as he puts it, “there’s no differentiation between urban and rural” anymore.
