2025 in Review: Reaching New Heights
Let’s take a moment to look back on an incredible year. Explore Vexcel’s 2025 highlights and see what’s ahead in 2026.
2025 may be over, but our celebration is just beginning. Over the past 12 months, we found new ways to connect people to more imagery and data.
Industries moved faster, systems grew smarter, and teams made decisions they could trust.
Scale, consistency, and confidence became the difference between insight and guesswork.
Vexcel didn’t just respond to that demand; we helped lead it and set the pace. But what made 2025 a banner year for us wasn’t a single breakthrough or milestone. It was how our sensors, fleet, data, processing, platforms, and AI worked together as one ecosystem at a scale no one else matches. And as we head into 2026, that momentum continues to accelerate.
Vexcel: An Ecosystem Built for Scale
We aren’t a company with a single product or workflow. We are a robust ecosystem that captures, processes, and delivers the best views of Earth in great detail across 45+ countries.
Each piece of our ecosystem operates in sync, and that integration matters. Why? Because it allows us to maintain consistent standards across cities and countries, publish data faster, and support everything from everyday operations to disaster response and AI-driven automation.
This ecosystem approach also allows us to push limits and reach new heights across multiple areas, whether by expanding coverage, enhancing engineering processes, or improving operational discipline so our customers get the quality they know and expect from Vexcel.
Vexcel’s ecosystem of Systems, Fleet, and Data working seamlessly together
A Breakthrough Year for Vexcel Imaging
In 2025, Vexcel Imaging delivered its largest camera system expansion ever.
Three new systems entered the field: Osprey 4.2, the already award-winning Dragon 4.2, and Merlin 5.0. Each was engineered to perform at scale, enabling high-detail mapping across dense urban environments, wide corridors, and complex terrain.
This wasn’t just about adding hardware. It was about pushing system performance, supporting higher-altitude collection where needed, and enabling more efficient coverage without sacrificing the level of detail modern workflows demand. These systems are already reshaping how large areas are captured and how quickly high-quality data becomes available.
The trio of new UltraCam systems in 2025: Osprey 4.2, Award-winning Dragon 4.2, and Merlin 5.0
Collection at a Global Pace
Imaging innovation only matters if it can be deployed at scale. And at Vexcel, scale is one thing that really sets us apart.
Throughout the year, we had 100 planes across our fleet and trusted third-party fliers up in the air collecting data. On average, they captured between 400-600 km² an hour.
And exactly how much imagery and data did our fleet collect? In 2025, we collected:
- 5.1 million km² in the U.S.
- 800,000+ km² in Europe
- Additional collections in other countries
The grand total? More than 6 million km² captured in 2025. And we added our first collection in India! We now collect imagery in 45+ countries. No other aerial imagery program operates at this scale.
From Capture to Insights: Data at Massive Volume
Collecting imagery is only the first step. What happens next is where raw pixels become something far more powerful.
Every image captured flows through UltraMap, Vexcel’s processing engine. In 2025, UltraMap processed thousands of images every day, learning from each one and continuously strengthening performance and reliability across the pipeline.
In terms of publishing imagery, we boosted production with:
- 160,000+ images published daily
- 58 million ortho and oblique images published for 2025
- Over 18 petabytes of data (that’s a lot!)
Delivering Data Where Work Happens
Throughout 2025, we continued to deliver imagery and data where customers needed it, whether through the Vexcel Viewer, integrations with third-party platforms, map tiles, APIs, or a growing network of trusted partners. We updated the Viewer with 16 new features, including updates to MapControl 2.0, Virtual Layers, Cesium compatibility, and more. We also enhanced onboarding with a library of Viewer and Admin tutorial videos.
This flexibility allows customers to plug Vexcel data directly into their existing workflows, automate processes, and scale operations without friction. Access and tools turn imagery into action, and this year reinforced how essential that connection has become.
16 new features in the Vexcel Viewer launched in 2025
Fueling the Next Generation of AI
AI in 2025 didn’t just analyze the world, it worked to understand it. And that exposed a hard truth: intelligence only goes as far as the data beneath it. The strength of any AI model depends on the data that fuels it.
Vexcel data is built for understanding. Consistent viewpoints, reliable context, and rich spatial signals give algorithms a stable foundation to recognize patterns, extract features, and interpret change without constant recalibration. That’s why major innovators plug Vexcel data directly into their AI workflows and pipelines, helping generate more reliable outputs and see the real world the way humans do.
Because when AI needs to understand the real world, it runs on Vexcel data.
Looking Ahead to 2026
As we take these first steps into 2026, one thing is really clear: to meet the technological and AI advancements moving companies into the future, organizations need the right information and data today. And Vexcel is setting the standard as the most advanced aerial imagery ecosystem in the world, end to end.
We’ve charted the path forward. Our systems, data, and delivery have raised expectations across the imagery industry, and there’s no going back. What comes next won’t be incremental. It will be decisive. And it will belong to Vexcel.
