Apaluma started in Santa Fe, NM in 2024 after watching planning staff spend hours each week pulling permit history from physical binders and shared drive archives. We built the extraction pipeline we kept wishing existed.
County planning staff are good at their jobs. The friction they face is not competence. It is infrastructure. Permit records from the 1980s through 2010s exist as scanned PDFs in shared network drives. Looking up a parcel's history means knowing which folder it might be in, opening individual PDFs, and reading them one at a time.
Alicia J. Keyes, Apaluma's founder, worked in GIS and planning technology for several years before starting the company. The same pattern appeared in county after county: sophisticated GIS infrastructure running on top of a documents layer that had never been structured. The data was there. Nobody had built the bridge.
Apaluma is that bridge. We extract records from the scanned documents, match them to parcels, and surface them in the GIS tools planning departments already use. No new systems to adopt, no manual re-entry, no lost history.
A confident wrong match is worse than a flagged uncertain one. The pipeline flags records it is not sure about rather than making a best guess and moving on. Staff review is built into the product, not bolted on as an afterthought.
We output to formats planning departments already use. GeoJSON, Shapefile, KML. No new GIS platform, no consultant required for the first import. The result should load with the same steps as any other data layer.
Every county archive is different. We scope each pilot against a real document set before any subscription begins. You see the extraction accuracy on your documents before you commit to anything.
Background in GIS consulting and planning technology, working with county agencies across New Mexico, Colorado, and Arizona on records infrastructure before founding Apaluma in 2024. The extraction pipeline grew out of work she kept doing by hand.
Document extraction and pipeline engineering background, building structured data systems for legal and public-sector clients before joining Apaluma. Designed the field normalization and schema-matching layer that handles format variation across county archives.
Geodata engineer with a background in municipal GIS platforms and spatial database systems. Responsible for the APN match engine and the GIS export layer that bridges extracted records to county parcel data.
We are based in Santa Fe, NM. The surrounding region's mix of historic land records and modern county GIS infrastructure made it an ideal place to test the pipeline with real-world archive complexity.
We scope every pilot to a specific document type and parcel set from your county. Contact us to start the conversation.
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