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Today, we’re excited to officially launch Aperture® Pulse — a breakthrough solution for detecting and tracking economic change at scale.
Pulse brings an unprecedented combination of satellite coverage, AI-driven signal extraction, and economic context modeling to help organizations monitor vast regions of the planet for change — not just as it happens, but before its consequences become visible in traditional data. Whether it’s the emergence of a new logistics hub, a sudden shift in population patterns, or previously invisible signs of urban sprawl, Aperture Pulse helps teams see early, act faster, and plan smarter.
Why Pulse, Why Now?
Most economic planning tools were designed for a world that changed slowly and/or linearly. Today, infrastructure projects break ground before permits are published. Population displacement happens in days, not years. And new development zones materialize long before they’re reflected in real estate comps or census reports.
What’s worse — existing geospatial tools weren’t designed to keep up. They’re typically built for situations where you already know where to look. Analysts are forced to predefine areas of interest (AOIs), making it easy to miss the unexpected. These tools also remain largely tethered to visual dashboards and disconnected from algorithmic workflows built for dynamic action at scale.
Aperture Pulse was built to solve this gap. It’s designed from the ground up to:
- Detect change across thousands or even millions of square kilometers in a single pass
- Focus on changes with economic and operational consequence — not just object classification
- Provide ongoing, refreshable insight — not a one-time snapshot
What Makes Pulse Different
One of the most transformative aspects of Aperture Pulse is its global availability. While it brings fresh, actionable insight even in high-data regions like the U.S., its impact is especially pronounced in markets where traditional map and infrastructure data can be months or years behind. Pulse delivers a consistent, high-frequency lens on physical economic change — wherever it’s happening.
To understand the gap Pulse fills, consider the tools data scientists rely on today:
- Permitting databases are slow, fragmented, and often miss early-stage activity.
- Crowd-sourced platforms like OpenStreetMap lag behind real-world development and offer uneven global coverage.
- Aerial and high-resolution satellite tasking provides clarity, but it’s costly, narrow in scope, and operationally complex.
- Land cover classification tools identify what exists, but not whether it’s new, changing, or economically meaningful.
Pulse bridges these limitations by providing:
- Scalable Coverage: Continuous monitoring of thousands of square kilometers — from national corridors to emerging metro zones.
- Economically Relevant Detection: Identifying patterns that matter — construction starts, logistics infrastructure, and informal expansion.
- Global, Source-Agnostic Infrastructure: Fusing public and commercial satellite imagery through deep learning pipelines optimized for resolution, cadence, and cost.
- Decision-Ready Outputs: Delivering structured change data directly into existing enterprise systems — without the need for manual interpretation or GIS specialization.
By making these capabilities available globally, Pulse unlocks a powerful new toolkit for planners, analysts, and investors — especially in regions where timely, reliable spatial data has been hardest to access.
Pulse in Action: Supply Chain Visibility That’s Faster, Broader, and Smarter
Imagine you're part of a global supply chain strategy team for a multinational logistics firm. You're monitoring long-term investments across several regions — including a growing airport corridor in the Southeastern United States, a port expansion in Central America, and emerging industrial clusters near a new rail link in Eastern Europe.
Each of these sites is developing fast, but none have been picked up by permitting databases, trade data, or mainstream real estate sources.
With Aperture Pulse, you would have seen:
- New construction zones and site clearings forming around the Southeastern U.S. airport, weeks or months before permit filings are disclosed
- Progressive expansion of warehouse-scale footprints and roadway upgrades tied to port traffic patterns in Central America that foretell increasing freight and commodity trade activity
- Rapid growth in paved infrastructure and previously untracked facility development around the rail corridor in Eastern Europe, which may have implications for housing and services needs, and private sector services and logistics
More importantly, you could evaluate all three sites in parallel — benchmarking activity intensity, growth velocity, and spatial pattern consistency — to identify which hubs are likely to scale and which are showing early signs of saturation.
That’s the power of Pulse: a unified, global system for detecting economically significant change — faster than traditional market signals, across geographies, and at a fraction of the cost of manual data collection or custom tasking. It’s how organizations stay ahead of what’s happening, and act before the opportunity passes.
Who Is Pulse Built For?
Pulse was designed to support decision-makers across sectors where timely, high-resolution insight into physical and economic change drives competitive advantage or mission-critical outcomes. Key user segments include:
- Supply Chain and Logistics Leaders: Identify emerging infrastructure corridors, detect early signs of network strain, and reroute before chokepoints form
- Real Estate and Industrial Investors: Track development momentum around transit hubs and urban edges to anticipate market growth ahead of traditional comps
- Public Sector Planners and Development Agencies: Monitor informal settlement growth, infrastructure expansion, and population shifts to guide targeted investment
- Insurance and Risk Intelligence Teams: Detect new construction or exposure areas to improve underwriting, risk assessment, and claims validation
- Multilateral and Humanitarian Organizations: Respond faster to conflict- or climate-driven displacement by monitoring rapid changes in settlement patterns
Each of these users faces a version of the same problem: relying on tools that explain the past while trying to make decisions about the future. Pulse offers a way forward — with scalable, predictive insight grounded in the physical world.
Behind the Scenes: What Makes This Possible
Aperture Pulse is powered by:
- The Atlas of Human Settlements, a proprietary mapping layer built on over a decade of satellite data and enriched with socio-economic signals (Read More)
- Foundation models trained on physical economy change, not just object detection — meaning we see not just what’s there, but how it’s evolving
- An orchestration layer that fuses imagery sources globally and optimizes coverage to balance resolution, latency, and cost for real-world operational use
We’ve spent years refining this capability as an embedded capability within the full Aperture GeoAI platform for forecasting and simulation workflows. With Pulse, we’re now making wide area monitoring signals directly available to customers.
Ready to See More?
Visit this form to request access, explore data samples, and connect with our team.
The next big shift in your world won’t announce itself in a market report or wait for a dashboard update. But with Pulse, you’ll see it first — and act while it still matters.
