Safe Software pushes deeper into AI and spatial computing with new product launches

Safe Software is entering a new phase of growth — and it’s betting that the future of enterprise data lies at the intersection of spatial computing, real-time access, and artificial intelligence.

The Surrey-based company, known for its flagship no-code data integration platform FME, is unveiling two major product innovations this week at its annual user conference in Seattle. The announcements — FME Realize and FME Data Virtualization — extend the reach of Safe’s products into AR-powered fieldwork and AI-ready data access, all without writing a line of code.

This marks a significant evolution for the BC firm, which is on track to surpass $110 million in revenue this year and grow to 500 employees by the end of 2026. “This year we’re going to be about 112 [million],” said Don Murray, co-founder and CEO of Safe Software, in an interview with Vancouver Tech Journal. “And we’re really seeing a lot of growth, particularly in the enterprise, with subscriptions — and it’s growth in all markets: North America, Europe, and Asia.”

Augmented reality meets infrastructure inspection

The first of the two new products, FME Realize, is a spatial computing solution built for field teams. It allows users — like utility crews or municipal workers — to visualize digital twins and enterprise data in real time through their digital devices like iPhones and Apple Vision Pro headsets.

In practice, that means workers can walk a job site and overlay live 3D data on top of the real world: viewing underground pipes, inspecting infrastructure, checking real-time stats, and even editing data on the spot. “A big one is infrastructure inspection,” Murray explained. “So, for example, you’re a city and you have underground pipes, and you want to be able to inspect them, know where they are… check on if there’s a valve, its pressure, while you’re in the field.”

The product supports photos, form submissions, and voice input — giving workers multiple ways to send updates back to HQ in real time. “If it’s raining, they can also just talk into it, and then it will be transposed and saved in the database as text,” Murray said.

For organizations already investing in digital twins, FME Realize offers a key unlock: live, mobile access to operational data that has long been confined to central control rooms. “Now the person can walk around and on their phone, they can see whatever is going on in the digital twin,” Murray added. “It’s really going to empower the field worker.”

Turning workflows into APIs — instantly

The second release, FME Data Virtualization, enables organizations to generate secure, OpenAPI-compliant APIs directly from their FME workflows — instantly exposing live, filtered data without moving it or writing backend code.

“Now what you can do is build an OpenAPI layer — a REST API — on top of all your data,” Murray explained. “And the nice thing is, there’s one authentication into the virtualization layer, and the layer underneath looks after all the different systems.”

The feature, now in beta, transforms how enterprises share and interact with data. Organizations can now expose just part of a dataset — for instance, 6 out of 10 database columns — without risking sensitive information. “There’s no way in the past you could give access to that table to anybody,” Murray said. “Now, with data virtualization, you could easily just share those four columns. And there’s no way anybody’s going to get access to the rest.”

Built-in authentication, filtering, caching, and permissions make the APIs production-ready — and friendly to AI agents as well. “It just happens that OpenAI and other generative AI tools can consume an open API layer,” Murray said. “You can just talk to it… not just query the data, but actually update the data — all through your voice.”

“All Data, Any AI”

Both launches reinforce the company’s strategic push toward making complex, enterprise-grade tools available to non-developers — a concept that industry analysts have called the rise of the “citizen data engineer.”

“That really encapsulates what it’s all about,” said Murray. “You have very smart people who know their domain really well, but they don’t know how to write code. They don’t know how to write SQL… now, with data virtualization and generative AI, you can do that.”

It’s all part of Safe Software’s broader mission to support any data format, from any source, with any AI securely and at scale. “There are so many technologies coming at organizations, and the one thing they need is choice,” Murray said. “So when you think about AI — what AI do you want to use? It depends on what you’re doing.”

That flexibility has made the company’s pitch increasingly compelling. “When companies get squeezed on budgets, that’s where we really shine,” he added. “Because when they look at us versus the competitors, our value proposition is just so strong.”

With hundreds of new hires planned across sales, marketing, development, and customer success, Safe is poised for another major leap. Headquartered in Surrey, with employees across Canada, the company has stayed rooted in BC even as it scaled to serve customers on every continent — including giants like Google.

And if its latest launches are any indication, Safe is not just keeping up with the pace of innovation — it’s helping set it.