Four billion people on this planet do not have a verified address. Not a poor one, not an outdated one. No address at all. That means no formal bank account, no property registration, no reliable access to healthcare or government services. It means being economically invisible in a world that is increasingly organised around location data. It is one of the defining infrastructure gaps of our time, and until very recently, nobody in the geospatial industry had a credible answer to it.

by Kasun Illankoon, Editor in Chief at Tech Revolt

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UNL Global is trying to change that. The company has built a geospatial infrastructure platform that assigns a precise, 1x1 centimetre GeoID to every point on earth, indoors, outdoors, and across elevation. It is designed to work where traditional mapping has historically given up, in the dense urban corridors of Southeast Asia, in rural communities without road signage or postcodes, in the vertical complexity of buildings where a drone needs to know the difference between a rooftop and a doorstep. And it is doing all of this while positioning itself as the spatial backbone for autonomous vehicles, smart cities, and last-mile logistics at scale.

I spoke with Huub van den Brok, Chief Commercial and Strategy Officer at UNL Global, about what the company is actually building, why HERE Technologies invested in them rather than competed with them, and why the window to become the default standard for location infrastructure is not indefinitely open.

What UNL Is, and What It Is Not

The easiest mistake you can make when thinking about UNL is to frame it as a mapping company. It is not trying to replace Google Maps or Apple Maps. Van den Brok is direct about that distinction.

"Locations are dynamic and keeping up with the on-ground truth takes a massive amount of time and resources," he says. "Global market leaders like Google and HERE Technologies spend hundreds of millions of dollars yearly to keep their base map content up to date. But we are set on solving problems beyond mapping, and we focus on emerging markets where traditional players are less present. Our technology is complementary to traditional maps and brings a layer of spatial intelligence that allows businesses to leverage accuracy and geospatial context at a centimetre-level precision."

That framing matters because it redefines the competitive landscape entirely. UNL is not fighting for map territory. It is building on top of and alongside existing maps, adding a programmable spatial layer that encodes rules, permissions, restrictions, and location identities directly into the infrastructure rather than as a software overlay. Van den Brok describes it as building "the operating system for the physical world," and that is not marketing language. It reflects a genuinely different architectural philosophy.

"Our infrastructure enables real-world environments to be structured as a digital layer that both people and machines can understand and interact with," he explains. The distinction between a map and a machine-readable spatial operating system is the entire thesis of the company.

The Social Case That Became the Business Case

The addressing gap is not an abstract statistic for UNL. It is the founding thesis. Approximately 75 percent of the world is poorly addressed, and the consequences are not just inconvenient. They are systemic.

"Without an address, it becomes extremely difficult to participate in the formal economy," Van den Brok says. "Opening a bank account, signing a housing agreement, registering property ownership, accessing healthcare or government services. All of these require a verifiable address as a baseline. So the problem is both human and systemic."

What is interesting about how Van den Brok talks about this is that he refuses to separate the social mission from the commercial one. Most executives in this position perform a careful rhetorical dance, acknowledging impact language while steering quickly toward revenue. He does not do that.

"Honestly, I don't see these two things as being in tension and that's one of the things that makes UNL genuinely interesting," he says. "Many commercial organisations want to reach a larger addressable market, quite literally. By working with them, we create a commercial opportunity for those businesses while simultaneously bringing more of the global population into the formal address system and the digital economy."

He describes strong interest from national governments and postal organisations, the institutions that own and govern national addressing grids, who want UNL's infrastructure for two simultaneous reasons.

"We see strong interest from national governments and postal organisations to implement our infrastructure for two complementary reasons: to give their populations a verifiable address, and to expand the commercial reach of businesses operating within their borders. These two objectives reinforce one another rather than compete. The impact is the business case. That alignment is not something you find in many places, and it's a big part of why I believe in UNL's long-term trajectory."

Why HERE Technologies Invested Instead of Competed

One of the more telling signals about UNL's strategic position is its relationship with HERE Technologies. HERE is one of the world's largest mapping and location data companies, with billions of dollars invested in its own infrastructure and a dominant position across automotive, logistics, and enterprise geospatial services. It is also a UNL investor.

That relationship is worth pausing on. When a company that could credibly position itself as a competitor chooses to write a cheque instead, it is a form of market validation that no analyst report can manufacture.

"HERE Technologies is one of our main investors and a strategic partner, which in itself says a great deal about how the industry views UNL's unique position," Van den Brok says.

The logic, once you understand UNL's architecture, is not surprising. HERE has built one of the most comprehensive mapping layers in the world, and it still cannot solve the centimetre-precision, machine-readable spatial infrastructure problem that autonomous vehicles and urban robotics require. UNL's GeoID grid is IP-protected and, as Van den Brok notes, something no traditional mapping player can replicate at this stage. The investment is strategic alignment, not competition avoidance.

The Emerging Market Bet

UNL has been deliberately focused on emerging markets since day one, and Van den Brok is candid about why. Traditional mapping giants have historically prioritised the United States and Europe, where the economics of data collection and monetisation are most favourable. That leaves a significant vacuum in markets where the underlying need is often greatest.

"In the dynamic and fast-growing Southeast Asian market, businesses face unique challenges in finding location solutions tailored to their needs," he says. "This is where we bring immediate value and solve key challenges, especially in the context of on-demand services, logistics and mobility companies that rely on accurate data and efficient location-based services to provide seamless and reliable experiences."

The vertical focus is deliberate: mobility, ride-hailing, last-mile and last-meter delivery, smart city and urban development. Each of these offers what Van den Brok calls horizontal product applicability, meaning the same underlying spatial infrastructure serves multiple use cases without needing to be rebuilt from scratch for each one.

The surprises have been instructive. Government appetite has moved faster than expected. "The appetite from government has been strong and faster than we initially anticipated," he says. "Unsurprisingly, these industries tend to have long validation and procurement cycles. These are not typically early-adopter environments, which tells you something about how pressing the underlying need is."

When governments with notoriously slow procurement processes are accelerating their timelines, it is a signal that the problem is more urgent than polite industry conversation usually acknowledges.

The Use Case That Stopped Him Cold

I asked Van den Brok for the specific moment when the technology's implications became fully clear to him. His answer was about drone delivery in markets where traditional logistics simply breaks down.

"Imagine a logistics company trying to deliver medical supplies to a rural community that has no street address, no road signage, and no postcode," he says. "With traditional mapping, that last-mile problem is effectively unsolvable at scale. With UNL's 1x1cm GeoID grid, you can assign a precise, verifiable location ID to any point on earth, a doorstep, a rooftop, a field, and a drone can navigate directly to it, indoors or outdoors, at ground level or in elevation. That changes everything about how we think about logistics, emergency response, and infrastructure planning in underserved regions."

But what he kept returning to in our conversation was autonomous mobility. The capability that excites him equally is not just the precision of the location data but what can be encoded into it.

"Being able to encode rules, speed limits, access permissions, or geofencing directly into the spatial grid, not as a software layer on top of a map, but as a native property of the location itself, is a fundamentally different paradigm," he says. "That's when I realised we were not building a better map. We were building the operating system for the physical world."

That architecture, where spatial rules are properties of the location rather than instructions layered on top of it, is what makes UNL's infrastructure genuinely differentiated for the autonomous vehicle use case. An autonomous vehicle does not just need to know where it is. It needs to know what it is allowed to do at that precise point, in real time, at machine speed.

The Five-Year Vision and What Keeps Him Up at Night

The vision Van den Brok describes for a five-year horizon is ambitious but internally coherent. He sees UNL becoming the spatial backbone that industries build on, the equivalent of what cloud infrastructure became for software in the previous decade.

"The world in five years looks like one where location is no longer a barrier to participation, economic, social, or logistical," he says. "Billions of people who are currently invisible to the formal economy will have a verified address, and the infrastructure that enables that will also be powering autonomous vehicles, smart city operations and location-based applications across multiple continents. UNL will have become the spatial backbone, the Internet of Places, that industries build on."

The anxiety he carries is not about the technology. It is about timing and sequencing.

"Speed versus depth," he says. "We are operating in a space where the technology is genuinely ahead of market readiness in some verticals, and behind in others. Getting the sequencing right, knowing when to push and when to consolidate, is the hardest judgment call in a growth-stage company."

He is precise about what is at stake if they get the timing wrong. "Infrastructure plays are winner-takes-most by nature. The window to establish ourselves as the standard is not indefinitely open. That urgency is healthy, but it also means the margin for strategic error is slim. We need to keep executing with discipline, and that requires the right partners, the right team, and the right focus."

That last sentence is the honest version of every infrastructure company's core challenge. The technology can be right. The market can be real. The timing can be correct. And the whole thing can still fail if the organisational execution does not hold.

UNL is betting that it has all four. The four billion people without an address are betting on the same thing, even if they do not know the company's name yet.