Vexcel’s Sky-High Plan to Map 95% of the U.S. with AI-Ready Imagery

CENTENNIAL, CO – February 17, 2026 – Vexcel Data Program, the world's largest aerial imagery provider, has announced an ambitious 2026 collection plan for the United States that will refresh high-resolution aerial imagery for 95% of the nation's population. The initiative aims to capture nearly 5.2 million square kilometers of the contiguous U.S. and cities in Hawaii, covering over 122 million households in stunning detail. This is not just about taking pictures from the sky; it's a strategic effort to build a foundational data layer that underpins critical sectors including insurance, government, utilities, and the rapidly growing field of artificial intelligence.

Building on its extensive multi-year library, the 2026 program represents a significant continuation of Vexcel's mission to create a high-fidelity digital twin of the nation. "Building on the world's largest aerial imagery collection, our 2026 program reinforces Vexcel's commitment to capturing high-resolution data at an unmatched scale," said Rob Agee, Chief Operating Officer of Vexcel. "Accuracy is everything. By delivering market-leading precision, we empower our customers to solve their most complex challenges with confidence."

The Scale of the Sky

The sheer scale of the 2026 collection is immense, continuing an upward trend from the 5.1 million km² captured in 2025 and 4.9 million km² in 2024. The plan differentiates between urban and rural landscapes, tailoring the data to specific needs. Urban areas, totaling 1.5 million km², will be captured at an ultra-high 7.5cm resolution. At this level of detail, objects the size of a smartphone are discernible, allowing for granular analysis of infrastructure, properties, and urban change. This will provide fresh imagery for nearly 7,000 cities and towns.

An additional 3.7 million km² of wide-area imagery will be collected at 15cm resolution, covering both urban peripheries and vast rural regions. This ensures that even less populated areas receive consistent, high-quality data. For the most dynamic urban centers, Vexcel plans to conduct up to three separate collections throughout the year. This high refresh rate is crucial for time-sensitive applications, such as tracking construction progress, monitoring seasonal changes, or conducting post-disaster assessments where the most current view is paramount.

The entire operation is made possible by a dedicated fleet of fixed-wing aircraft equipped with Vexcel's proprietary, market-leading UltraCam sensors. These sophisticated cameras are designed for efficiency and quality, capturing large swaths of land with exceptional clarity and geometric accuracy from high altitudes.

The Invisible Infrastructure Powering America

While Vexcel's aircraft operate thousands of feet in the air, the data they collect has a profound, ground-level impact across the American economy. This high-resolution imagery serves as an invisible infrastructure, enabling data-driven decisions that were once impossible or prohibitively expensive.

In the insurance industry, the data is transformative. Underwriters use the imagery to accurately assess property risk, evaluating factors like roof condition, proximity to wildfire zones, or flood plains before a policy is even written. Following a catastrophe like a hurricane or tornado, Vexcel's post-event imagery allows insurers to remotely and rapidly assess damage across thousands of properties, dramatically speeding up claims processing for affected homeowners and reducing fraud.

Government agencies at federal, state, and local levels are also major consumers. Urban planners use the data to model city growth and manage land use. Public works departments monitor the condition of critical infrastructure like roads, bridges, and utilities without costly and disruptive physical inspections. For emergency responders, having an up-to-date, bird's-eye view of an incident area is invaluable for coordinating resources and saving lives.

Other sectors, from utilities managing vast networks of power lines to transportation companies optimizing logistics and supply chains, rely on this geospatial intelligence to operate more efficiently and safely. The consistent, nationwide coverage provides a reliable baseline for long-term analysis and change detection.

A Crowded Sky: Vexcel's Competitive Edge

The geospatial data market is a competitive space, with solutions ranging from global satellite constellations to nimble, localized drones. Vexcel has strategically positioned itself in a powerful niche by offering a product that blends the strengths of different platforms. Its aerial imagery provides significantly higher resolution than the best commercial satellites, which typically capture objects at 30cm or larger. This difference is critical for property-level analysis where details matter.

Compared to its direct aerial competitors like Nearmap and Hexagon, which also offer high-resolution products and frequent updates, Vexcel competes on the sheer scale of its coverage area. While competitors may focus on the most populated urban cores, Vexcel's commitment to covering nearly 5.2 million km², including vast rural territories, sets it apart. This makes its dataset invaluable for applications requiring a seamless, coast-to-coast view.

Meanwhile, drones, which can offer centimeter-level detail, are limited by battery life, regulations, and flight time, making them suitable for specific sites but impractical for state- or nationwide mapping. Vexcel’s fixed-wing aircraft bridge this gap, providing broad-area coverage with a level of detail that drones cannot achieve at scale and satellites cannot match in clarity.

Seeing Smarter: The AI Optimization Factor

A key aspect of the 2026 announcement is that all imagery and derived data products will be "optimized for artificial intelligence." This is more than a marketing buzzword; it points to a fundamental shift in how geospatial data is used. For AI and machine learning models to work effectively, they require data that is clean, consistent, and meticulously structured.

AI optimization means that Vexcel's data undergoes rigorous processing to ensure radiometric consistency and precise geometric accuracy. Different data layers—such as top-down (ortho), angled (oblique), and elevation models—are perfectly pixel-aligned. This allows AI algorithms to analyze multiple data types simultaneously, leading to richer insights.

This pre-processing saves data scientists and analysts hundreds of hours of manual data cleaning. More importantly, it enables the development of powerful AI applications. Algorithms trained on this data can automatically identify building footprints, classify land cover, detect changes in construction, measure road lane markings, or even identify every swimming pool in a county. These automated feature extraction capabilities, delivered at a massive scale, unlock efficiencies and insights that were previously unimaginable, powering the next generation of smart analytics for cities, corporations, and researchers.