TerraForge Labs

Inspiration

East Africa sits on some of the world's most underexplored critical mineral deposits — coltan, gold, and rare earths that global supply chains increasingly need — yet exploration data across the region remains fragmented, undocumented, or lost entirely between field visits and boardroom decisions. As a geologist who has done hands-on reconnaissance in the Migori Greenstone Belt and the Mozambique Mobile Belt, I experienced this gap firsthand: promising field data collected in areas with no reliable connectivity, with no system built to capture, structure, or act on it. TerraForge Labs started as an answer to that problem.

What it does

TerraForge Labs is an offline-first geoscience data platform that lets geologists capture, validate, and visualize field data — geochemical assays, structural mapping, site reconnaissance — without needing continuous internet access, syncing automatically once connectivity returns. It renders exploration sites in interactive 2D and 3D terrain views and applies AI-assisted analysis to help prioritize exploration targets, reducing the guesswork and cost of traditional methods.

How we built it

The frontend runs on Vite/React with MapLibre GL JS and CesiumJS for mapping and terrain visualization. The backend combines FastAPI, Django, and PostGIS for geospatial data handling. The platform is deployed with the frontend on Netlify and the backend on Railway.

Challenges we ran into

Getting to a stable deployment meant resolving a cascade of dependency conflicts, CORS issues, and environment variable misconfigurations between the Netlify/Railway split. On the mapping side, a MapLibre GL JS GeoJSON validation bug and a CesiumJS Appearance/Geometry mismatch both required careful debugging to get accurate terrain rendering working.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Reaching a working, deployed offline-first platform grounded in real field data — not synthetic examples — from actual reconnaissance at Kendege and Matuu. TerraForge also became the data backbone for a broader ecosystem, feeding supply chain data to Sokonis and underwriting intelligence to Bima Guardian, and incubating ReGen Insight, an environmental intelligence tool now spanning all 47 Kenyan counties.

What we learned

Building for offline-first environments forces a different kind of discipline — every design decision has to account for sync conflicts, data validation at the edge, and the reality that a geologist in the field can't just "refresh and try again." Debugging the MapLibre and CesiumJS issues also taught us how unforgiving geospatial rendering pipelines are: a single malformed GeoJSON object or a geometry/appearance mismatch can silently break an entire map view, so validation has to happen early and often, not just at deployment. Beyond the technical side, working across three interconnected ventures (TerraForge, Sokonis, Bima Guardian) reinforced how much value comes from treating geoscience data as shared infrastructure rather than a siloed dataset — the same field data that informs an exploration decision can also de-risk an insurance underwriting model or a supply chain forecast.

What's next for TerraForge Labs

The next phase is about scale and partnership. We're actively engaging U.S. investors and strategic partners — including DFC, Orion CMC, and NioCorp — around Kenya's underexplored critical mineral resources, with a pitch centered on supply chain diversification and AI-driven exploration risk reduction. We're also pursuing infrastructure and research collaboration with major tech players like Microsoft, Google, and OpenAI to strengthen the AI-assisted targeting pipeline, and exploring joint work with American universities to deepen the platform's geoscience data science capabilities. On the product side, we're expanding field validation beyond Kendege and Matuu to build a broader, more representative dataset across additional exploration sites, and continuing to grow ReGen Insight as a complementary environmental intelligence layer across Kenya's 47 counties.

Built With

• built
• cesiumjs
• django
• fastapi
• flutter
• javascript
• maplibre-gl-js
• netlify
• postgis
• python
• railway
• react
• typescript
• vite
• with