Earth Genome named winner of AWS IMAGINE Grant for Nonprofits to scale Earth Index and support environmental investigations

Earth Genome has been selected as a winner of the 2024–2025 Amazon Web Services (AWS) IMAGINE Grant, a public grant opportunity for nonprofits using technology to address the world’s most pressing challenges! The AWS IMAGINE grant will support the continued growth of Earth Index to help journalists, researchers and advocacy groups analyze and monitor the changing state of our planet. With this funding, we’re taking the next big step to meet rapidly growing demand, and scale Earth Index to cover the entire globe.

For seven years, the AWS IMAGINE Grant has provided vital resources to nonprofit organizations working on big ideas, leveraging cloud technology in new and innovative ways to accelerate impact in local and global communities. Earth Genome was named a winner in the Go Further, Faster category, which recognizes highly innovative projects using advanced cloud services. Earth Genome will receive $150,000 in unrestricted funding, $15,000 in AWS Promotional Credits, and engagement with AWS technical specialists.

Earth Index is already empowering environmental journalists and organizations to unlock critical information from satellite imagery, such as Mongabay’s recently published investigative series on clandestine airstrips in the Peruvian Amazon. With the support of AWS and other amazing funders like the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation, we’re scaling our infrastructure to operate at higher capacity and reach over impactful 1,000 users on Earth Index.

We have started migrating our imagery collection and processing pipelines to AWS, and we will continue this scaling work to include more diverse satellite imagery sources, reaching petabyte-scale compute and analysis. As an AI-powered application, Earth Index makes heavy use of Postgres and extensions to power efficient vector storage and search, and a key outcome of this work will be “planetary-scale” search by leveraging Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) and other AWS services.

“At AWS, we’re inspired by the nonprofit sector’s unwavering commitment to preserving the dignity and health of people and our planet,” said Allyson Fryhoff, managing director of nonprofit and nonprofit health at AWS. “Our Imagine Grant winners are pioneering groundbreaking, technology-driven approaches that will amplify their mission impact and build a more equitable and compassionate world. We are thrilled to work alongside these organizations, helping them leverage the transformative capabilities of the AWS Cloud to bring these projects to life.”

We’re deeply grateful to AWS for supporting our mission and for recognizing the potential of Earth Index to accelerate impact in the nonprofit sector. Stay tuned for updates as we roll out new features and expand Earth Index’s reach.