ABOUT
TerraFlow Geomatics was founded in 2013. It's bootstrapped and profitable, and more than 100 locating and radiation survey companies use it in the field every day, most of them locating underground utilities.
Behind it are twenty-five years of enterprise GIS for utilities, transit and mining.
We're a positioning and field-data company. Locators found us first, and they're still most of our customers. Then pole crews, landfill operators and radiation surveyors started calling. Their problem turned out to be the same one: a reading with no trustworthy position attached.
How it started
I've been doing mobile mapping since a summer job in 1994. I spent the next twenty-five years building enterprise GIS for utilities, transit and mining.
The maps were only as good as what came back from the field. Too often that was a sketch, a photo and someone's memory of where the reading was taken.
In 2013 I started TerraFlow to fix that part: get the reading and its exact position into the record while the crew is still standing there.
Kieren Tinning, founder
Who we answer to
TerraFlow isn't part of a hardware manufacturer, a ticket-system company or a one-call operator.
That's why we don't sell a ticket system or ask you to replace yours. It's why we read the locators and receivers our customers already own instead of selling our own. And it's why the locate record standard we've written is free for anyone to use.
Your locate records shouldn't be an input to someone else's business model.
What we do, and what we don't
Your ticket system, your operator's standard, your method and your GIS are yours. We don't replace any of them.
What we do is narrower: we record every reading with its position and the accuracy of that position, as the instruments and receivers reported them. What you conclude from the data stays yours.
Records that outlive everyone
Records have to outlive the contractor, the crew and the software that collected them.
We've been on the Port Hope Area Initiative since 2015. Canadian Nuclear Laboratories calls it one of Canada's largest environmental remediation projects. In that time the prime contractor changed and the technology changed.
You find out whether a vendor got that right when it's too late to change vendors.
Leadership
Kieren Tinning, Founder and CEO. LinkedIn
Testimonials
"TerraFlow is at the leading edge of the industry change. They're easy to work with, receptive to how and why you're using the software, and the ability to customize is impressive. One of the biggest advantages is TerraFlow is they're growing at the same pace we are." Peter Tatham, Premier Locates