When disaster strikes, the difference between rapid recovery and prolonged suffering often comes down to a single factor: the speed and accuracy with which response teams can assess damage, allocate resources, and coordinate relief efforts across affected communities. In the critical hours and days following hurricanes, wildfires, floods, and other catastrophic events, emergency management agencies require immediate access to high-resolution, property-level intelligence that transforms chaotic situations into structured, actionable operational pictures.
New Light Technologies, Inc. (NLT) is proud to announce a strategic collaboration with Nearmap, a global leader in high-resolution aerial imagery and location intelligence, to deliver rapid, integrated property intelligence in support of our customers' disaster response operations. This partnership brings together Nearmap's cutting-edge aerial capture technology with NLT's proven expertise in operationalizing complex geospatial data for mission-critical federal operations, creating a comprehensive solution that equips emergency managers with the tools they need to make life-saving decisions under extreme time pressure.
Read the full announcement from Nearmap here: Nearmap and New Light Collaborate to Support FEMA Disaster Response.
Following major disaster events, federal, state, and local emergency management agencies face an immediate operational challenge: they must rapidly assess damage across potentially thousands of square miles, prioritize response efforts, coordinate resource deployment, and establish common operating pictures that enable multiple agencies to work in concert. Traditional ground-based assessment methods, while thorough, are time-consuming, resource-intensive, and in many cases, dangerous for field personnel who must navigate compromised infrastructure, hazardous materials, and unstable structures.
The need for rapid, accurate, property-level damage intelligence has never been more acute; climate-related disasters are increasing in frequency and severity, urban areas are expanding into higher-risk zones, and the economic costs of delayed response continue to escalate. Emergency operations centers require imagery that is not only high-resolution but also captured quickly after an event, processed efficiently, and integrated seamlessly into existing decision-support workflows and platforms that incident commanders already rely upon during active operations.
New Light Technologies brings more than 25 years of deep partnership experience with emergency management organizations, providing customers with advanced geospatial analytics, data integration, and decision-support platforms. NLT's expertise lies not simply in processing data, but in transforming diverse, time-sensitive data streams into operational intelligence that directly supports field teams, emergency operations centers, and incident command structures.
At the heart of NLT's disaster response capabilities is the IMPACT platform, a cloud-native solution that ingests, processes, integrates, and visualizes geospatial data from multiple sources at scale. IMPACT provides the technical infrastructure and analytical workflows that enable customers and partner agencies to rapidly incorporate high-resolution aerial imagery, damage assessments, infrastructure data, population information, and resource tracking into unified common operating pictures spanning local, state, regional, and national operational levels.
NLT is widely recognized as a pioneer in cloud-based Machine Learning solutions for remotely sensed data, and the company has long specialized in data fusion, combining aerial, satellite, and ground data into IMPACT so that decision-makers can move from raw pixels to operational answers without changing tools or slowing down mission tempo.
Over more than two decades of delivery, NLT has partnered with numerous imagery providers and cloud geospatial ecosystems, including ICEYE, Planet, and Google Earth Engine, ensuring that customers can access the right data source for the operational question at hand, while benefiting from consistent, repeatable integration patterns, quality controls, and analytics pipelines.
NLT's collaboration with Nearmap represents a high-impact example of what the company does best — rapidly operationalizing high-resolution aerial capture for time-sensitive response — and it also sits within a deeper, long-running body of work that has helped customers translate multisource imagery into actionable, property-level intelligence.
For the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), NLT has supported imagery-driven workflows that extend beyond aerial capture; during Hurricane Michael, the company delivered flood detection using Planet imagery, demonstrating how optical satellite observations can be turned into rapid situational awareness products that support resource prioritization, field tasking, and the creation of a shared operating picture.
In parallel, NLT has worked with ICEYE, leveraging Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) capabilities to support persistent, all-weather monitoring for disaster and disruption scenarios; because SAR can observe through cloud cover and operate day or night, it provides a resilient complement to optical sources such as Planet and to post-event aerial collections such as Nearmap.
For the World Bank, NLT has supported the use of AI and Machine Learning (AI/ML) on global imagery to analyze urbanization patterns at scale, enabling development stakeholders to quantify change, monitor growth, and target interventions using repeatable, cloud-ready analytics that can be refreshed as new imagery becomes available.
The NLT-Nearmap collaboration creates an end-to-end pipeline that dramatically compresses the timeline from disaster event to actionable intelligence. Within hours of a catastrophic event, Nearmap aircraft capture high-resolution imagery across affected areas; this imagery is processed through Nearmap's AI-powered damage assessment tools to generate property-level classifications and damage attributes; NLT's integration workflows then ingest these assessments into the IMPACT platform, where they are overlaid with critical infrastructure data, demographic information, pre-event baselines, and real-time operational data from field teams and emergency operations centers.
The result is a comprehensive, property-level understanding of disaster impacts that enables emergency managers to answer critical operational questions: Which neighborhoods sustained the most severe damage and require immediate search-and-rescue operations? Where should temporary shelters be established to serve displaced populations? Which critical infrastructure facilities — hospitals, fire stations, water treatment plants, and electrical substations — have been compromised and require priority restoration efforts?
This integrated approach delivers value across the entire disaster lifecycle, from initial impact assessment through long-term recovery operations. During the immediate response phase, rapid damage classification enables incident commanders to prioritize life-safety operations and allocate scarce resources to areas of greatest need. In the days and weeks following an event, detailed property-level assessments support individual assistance programs, insurance claims processing, debris removal planning, and infrastructure restoration sequencing.
The collaboration between NLT and Nearmap reflects a broader evolution in how emergency management agencies leverage technology to meet increasingly complex operational challenges. As disasters become more frequent and severe, traditional response paradigms based primarily on ground-based assessment and manual data collection cannot keep pace with the speed and scale required to evaluate damage and deploy resources.
The integration of high-resolution aerial intelligence with cloud-native data platforms represents a fundamental shift toward data-driven, technology-enabled emergency management, empowering agencies to operate with greater speed, accuracy, and coordination. By combining Nearmap's exemplary aerial capture and AI-powered damage assessment capabilities with NLT's proven expertise in operationalizing complex geospatial data for federal agencies, this partnership delivers solutions that meet operational requirements while establishing new benchmarks for what is possible in disaster response operations.
NLT's partnership with Nearmap builds upon the company's 25-year legacy of delivering operational solutions for emergency management, disaster response, and climate resilience. From supporting the U.S. Census Bureau's Disclosure Avoidance System to operationalizing the World Bank's global nighttime lights archive, from building offline mobile apps for disaster zones to developing the DIRE (Dynamic Infectious Disease Risk) platform with UC San Diego and UNICEF, NLT has consistently demonstrated its ability to bridge cutting-edge technology with real-world operational workflows that serve critical missions.
As climate risks continue to evolve and the operational demands on emergency management agencies intensify, NLT remains committed to advancing the state of practice through partnerships with leading technology providers, continuous innovation in cloud-native platforms and AI-powered analytics, and deep collaboration with the federal, state, local, and international agencies that serve communities in their most vulnerable moments.
New Light Technologies, Inc. (NLT) is a mission-focused technology, science, and product company with over 25 years of experience delivering operational solutions for emergency management, disaster response, climate resilience, and complex data operations at scale. NLT partners with commercial, federal, state, local, and international organizations to strengthen preparedness, accelerate response, and support long-term recovery in high-stakes, real-world environments.
NLT designs, builds, and operates secure, cloud-native platforms and managed services that transform raw, time-sensitive data into actionable intelligence. Its solutions operationalize geospatial analytics, data integration, automation, and decision-support workflows — enabling rapid imagery ingestion, damage assessment, common operating pictures, infrastructure monitoring, and secure collaboration across distributed teams.
Headquartered in Washington, D.C., New Light Technologies is a trusted partner to public and private sector organizations worldwide. NLT is committed to delivering resilient, scalable solutions that help agencies and enterprises adapt to evolving risks, manage complexity, and better serve communities before, during, and after critical events.
Ready to transform your disaster response capabilities? Contact us to schedule a discovery call and learn how NLT can help your organization operationalize cutting-edge geospatial intelligence for mission-critical operations.