Photo geolocation · Terrain intelligence
SunderStar pinpoints the location of any photo, even in places with no Street View — conflict zones, disaster areas, open wilderness. We read the terrain itself.
The problem
Every existing geolocation tool depends on street-level imagery. That imagery covers a narrow slice of the world — and almost none of the places where verifying a photo's origin is urgent.
Works on a mapped roadside in a major city. Fails in a conflict zone, a disaster area, or the middle of a mountain range — where no survey vehicle has ever driven.
Skylines, ridgelines, and water are visible from the ground and recorded from orbit. Satellite and elevation data covers every square kilometer of land on Earth.
How it works
From a single photo, we isolate the geometry that the landscape imposes — the skyline profile, ridgeline contours, and the edges of coast, lake, and river.
That signature is searched against satellite imagery and digital elevation models spanning the entire planet, narrowing millions of candidates to a handful.
You get a precise camera position, viewing direction, and a calibrated confidence score — evidence you can show your work with, not just a pin on a map.
Why it matters
Skilled geolocation analysts do this by hand, cross-referencing terrain against maps for hours per image. That doesn't scale to a breaking news cycle or an active search.
Who it's for
Verify the origin of footage before it runs, and document the reasoning behind the claim.
Turn photos coming out of an affected region into mapped coordinates for triage and routing.
Localize a last-known photo from a missing hiker to a ridgeline, and narrow the search area.
Establish where evidence was captured when metadata is missing, stripped, or disputed.
Team
Studies computer science at Harvard and builds open-source tools for exoplanet discovery — finding faint signals in noisy sky data.
We're looking for a second founder with deep operational experience — someone who has worked in the field where locating a photo is urgent, not academic. Get in touch.
Get in touch
We're onboarding early users now. If you work in verification, response, or rescue, we'd like to hear about your workflow.