INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Satellite imagery holds a wealth of information that could be useful for industries, science and humanitarian causes, but one big and
better analytics, and now, one of the startups that has been building solutions to do just that is announcing a round of funding as it gears
Descartes Labs, a geospatial imagery analytics startup out of Santa Fe, New Mexico, is today announcing that it has closed a $20 million
round of funding, money that CEO and founder Mark Johnson described to me as a bridge round ahead of the startup closing and announcing a
larger growth round.The funding is being led by Union Grove Venture Partners, with Ajax Strategies, Crosslink Capital, and March Capital
Partners (which led its previous round) also participating
area of geospatial analytics, Orbital Insight, is reportedly now raising money at a $430 million valuation (that data is from January of
he never thought the company would stay headquartered there beyond a short initial phase of growth of six months.However, it turned out that
the trends around more distributed workforces (and cloud computing to enable that), engineers looking for employment alternatives to living
in pricey San Francisco, plus the heated competition for talent you get in the Valley all came together in a perfect storm that helped
By this, it means it injests a lot of imagery and unstructured data related to the earth that is picked up primarily by satellites but also
other sensors (Johnson notes that its sources include data from publicly available satellites; data from NASA and the European space agency,
and data from the companies themselves); applies AI-based techniques including computer vision analysis and machine learning to make sense
of the sometimes-grainy imagery; and distills and orders it to create insights into what is going on down below, and how that is likely to
evolve.This includes not just what is happening on the surface of the earth, but also in the air above it: Descartes Labs has worked on
projects to detect levels of methane gas in oil fields, the spread of wildfires, and how crops might grow in a particular area, and the
impact of weather patterns on it all.It has produced work for a range of clients that have included governments (the methane detection,
help, for example, bankers forecast how much a commodity will trade for, or the effect of a change in soil composition on a crop.The fact
But in case you were wondering, Johnson said that the company goes through a process of vetting potential customers to determine if the data
data from different regions more seamlessly (since, after all, a climatic event in one part of the world inevitably impacts another)
Veery Maxwell, Director for Energy Innovation and Patrick Cairns, who co-founded UGVP, as new board observers.
