Commercial real estate may hold trillions in physical assets, but much of its value remains invisible—trapped in analog processes and scattered data. That disconnect has driven Geolava, a startup founded to bring buildings online through spatial intelligence, from a bold idea to a partnership with JLL.
In August 2025, Geolava CEO Hantz Févry told GlobeSt.com that the company’s goal “is not to replace the human inspector or appraiser. It’s to have a pulse on the properties.” At the time, the firm observed a paradox: real estate is among the most important industries in the economy, yet its assets remain largely offline.
Months later, that mission found its footing when Geolava began working with JLL. “We provide the intelligence and models so they can make assessments from spatial intelligence,” Févry now tells GlobeSt.com.
“After August, we realized that asset managers and property owners were losing money.”
A property can be profitable yet still lose value in unexpected ways due to inefficiencies, maintenance issues or missed opportunities hidden in the data. Geolava tackles that challenge by assembling an expansive digital mosaic of each property, drawing on low Earth-orbit satellites, multispectral LiDAR scans, thermal sensors and imagery from drones, street-level cameras and stratospheric platforms. These sources capture everything from subtle roof defects to traffic patterns that once required on-site inspections.
The company doesn’t stop at physical imagery. It layers zoning data, construction ordinances, foot-traffic patterns, and even the historical context of sites to create a fuller picture of asset performance. For investors and managers, gathering and analyzing that depth of information would be prohibitively time-consuming through conventional methods.
Understanding how this wealth of information influences valuation is the company’s core challenge. Out of more than 700 data attributes, Geolava’s task is “to parse the signal from the noise and know this is what matters in the future,” says Févry. The goal isn’t prediction—“crystal balls don’t exist,” he notes—but rather identifying “the potential upsides and potential downsides that may affect the value of the property.”
That focus on opportunity is as important as assessing risk, Févry adds.
“There are some companies with so many properties in their portfolios that no one asks that question” of what might be possible.
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