Satellogic™, a provider of affordable, high-resolution Earth Observation (EO), has just announced the company has closed a substantial $27 million Series B funding round.
The closing of the series B round happened during the same week as the launch into orbit of the company’s sixth smallsat (the third in its high-resolution imaging constellation) on June 15 from Jiuquan, China. Investors in this round include the Chinese company Tencent® as the lead, backed up by São Paulo-based Pitanga™, CrunchFund™ and other investors.
Satellogic has created a uniquely low-cost smallsat platform with unparalleled capabilities, enabling for the first time affordable monitoring of the planet at one meter of resolution and high-frequency, hyper-spectral data solutions ideally suited for advanced geo-intelligence and other applications. The one meter resolution payload in Satellogic’s satellites captures state-of-the-art high quality, high-resolution data at a small fraction of the cost of competing systems, enabling for the first time the affordable monitoring of human activity on the planet.
The hyper spectral camera is unique among its competitors' satellites in orbit, and is capable of 30 meter spatial resolution from orbit and has the ability to discern narrow spectral bands positioned with nanometric precision along the visible and near-infrared spectrum. Hyper-spectral imaging allows the advanced identification of both materials and molecular processes, and is particularly well-suited for agriculture, environmental and climate-change monitoring. Other applications of hyperspectral data include land use classification intelligence for industry and government planning as well as forecasting, mineralogical discovery and forestry management.
With the March 2017 de-commissioning of NASA's Hyperion bird, Satellogic is now the sole supplier of high-resolution, hyper-spectral imagery in the world.
Emiliano Kargieman, the CEO and founder of Satellogic, noted that the combination of Satellogic's capabilities for low-cost data capture in high-resolution and the hyperspectral domain are a powerful enabler for the firm's own data science teams, in addition for those of company partners, and ultimately allow more value to be provided to end customers. He emphasized that the company is focused on unlocking the value of live geo-information analytics to improve daily decision-making for every branch of government and for every corporation, small company or person on the planet.
