Overview
Wherobots is a Series A-stage startup building the Spatial Intelligence Cloud that makes it possible to build production-ready data products with data about the physical world up to 20X faster and at a fraction of the cost of existing approaches. Founded by the creators of Apache Sedona (used by more than 20,000 organizations), Wherobots brings the performance and governance of a modern lakehouse architecture to spatial data workloads through its optimized Sedna-compatible engine and SedonaDB, a spatial-first single-machine runtime. Teams move from complex, do-it-yourself pipelines to 5–20× faster processing without having to manage infrastructure.
The Challenge
When Ben Pruden joined to lead go-to-market, the team lacked visibility into how their open source was being adopted.
“We didn’t have any telemetry about what’s happening with our open source, which basically means we were kind of flying blind,” Ben said.
This was especially challenging due to the fact that Apache Sedona, being part of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF), has strict governance when it comes to introducing changes and analytics to the project. Scarf provided an easy solution, being the only approved service provider for open source usage analytics within the ASF. Apache Sedona was able to set up Scarf and be completely compliant with foundation guidelines.
“It was literally the first thing that I did when I joined.”
The goal was to better understand who was using Apache Sedona, how usage was changing, and where to focus DevRel and go-to-market efforts.
The Solution
Wherobots implemented Scarf to illuminate open-source usage and turn it into actionable intelligence.
“The main thing that’s really useful for me is understanding how our telemetry’s changing over time—what drives more interest and engagement, who’s adopting what, and where the most growth is happening,” Ben explained.
By connecting Scarf data to CommonRoom, the team now prioritizes outreach by activity and timing. “Getting to people at the right time,” Ben said, has proven to be the highest-single factor for engagement. DevRel and product teams also rely on Scarf insights to refine content and documentation.
“[Scarf helps us with] identifying patterns … Where people are spending the most time … where we might want to fix things, make them better from a user-experience perspective.”
Summing up the impact, Ben shared: “It gives us visibility where we wouldn’t otherwise have it into our open source—what’s working for people—and we use that to inform our activities across both DevRel and go-to-market.”
Key Outcomes
- Continuous visibility into open-source adoption and engagement
- Sharper ICP definition and account prioritization
- Better sales timing through usage-based signals
- Improved documentation and DevRel focus from user behavior insights
- Scarf data operationalized within CommonRoom for coordinated GTM execution
