When Albedo was started, the idea of building phone-booth sized satellites that would fly 2x lower than LEO satellites and collect imagery at a resolution previously only possible from drones and planes, largely felt like a dream, one that could, hopefully, transform to an achievable goal.
Now, three and a half years later, that dream is a tangible and imminent reality, mostly due to three elements:
- The company’s progress is real. Albedo has assembled an incredible team and the ensuing, rigorous engineering is laudable. Engineering a first-of-its-kind satellite to capture imagery, at close to an order of magnitude higher than the current best, is not an easy feat – and that’s been accomplished in a couple of years. At the firm’s manufacturing facility in Denver, hardware is being built; mechanical structures, boards, wiring, embedded software, cloud software are all being integrated and manifesting in real time. VLEO is a new domain, but with a first-principles approach from a team of smart engineers, we’ve engineered a truly novel platform with big benefits for Earth Observation (EO).
- A contract with SpaceX for the launch of Albedo’s first satellite has now been signed. SpaceX will launch Albedo’s 10 cm visible x 2 meter thermal infrared satellite into SSO aboard the Transporter-13 Rideshare mission no earlier than February of 2025. This time next year, Albedo will be on-orbit capturing imagery.
- A fair amount of Clarity-1’s tasking images have already been reserved — Clarity is officially the name of Albedo’s first satellite constellation that doubles down on the firm’s belief that the clarity from the company’s high-resolution imagery will directly translate to certainty in insights, analysis, and decision-making for users.
The company is also featuring a subset of the official customers who have reserved a portion of Clarity-1’s tasking images to empower their applications, including power line vegetation-management, commodity trading, mining elevation surveys, gas pipeline monitoring, AI infrastructure, consumer tasking, and defense & intelligence. The breadth of applications is vast and we are just getting started.
- AiDash is an enterprise SaaS company making critical infrastructure industries more climate resilient and sustainable with satellites and AI. In simpler terms, they help mitigate the risk and impact of disasters like storms and wildfires — from space. We’re proud to partner with a company like AiDash to help them create a greener, cleaner, and safer planet.
- Japan Space Imaging (JSI) has been the leading provider of satellite imagery and geospatial solutions in Japan since 1998. They have extensive experience in the satellite imagery industry, and we are excited to partner with them to bring Albedo products to the Japanese market.
- Open Grid Europe (OGE) is Germany’s largest gas transmission grid operator, managing over 12,000 km of pipelines to ensure safety, integrity, and environmental sustainability. They will leverage Albedo’s imagery as the first space-based component of their current aerial monitoring fleet.
PhotoSat provides geospatial solutions for the mining and geology industries, leveraging proprietary deep learning algorithms to build accurate elevation surveys and alteration maps. They will use Albedo’s visible + thermal imagery and stereo collections to enable higher accuracy and to fill gaps in areas where drones are challenging to deploy.
- ScaleAI has built an incredible platform for managing data, plus the training and deployment of models driven by that data. Notably, their Damage Identification as a Service product, which leveraged satellite imagery over Ukraine, was named one of TIME’s Best Inventions of 2022. We’re excited to partner with Scale and see what AI can do with our unprecedented quality of data.
- SkyFi put into practice their mission of democratizing access to satellite imagery when they launched their product last year. They have been steadily increased the number of partners on their platform, and we look forward to the day that Albedo is among them. Like SkyFi, we believe satellite imagery is an under-utilized resource and simplifying access is a key piece of broadening the usage aperture.
- Unnamed major multi-strategy hedge fund: While we can’t get into the specifics, this hedge fund is excited about using Albedo’s ultra-high resolution imagery and low-latency processing to assess events across the globe in a timely manner.
By participating in Albedo Reserve, these customers have guaranteed their access to tasking — meaning that they won’t have to worry about conflicts, priorities, or any of the other issues that commonly get in the way of acquiring fresh satellite imagery. Albedo has meticulously analyzed and provisioned imaging availability for the first two years on-orbit to assure this high level of service. If Clarity-1 ends up fully reserved, the next opportunity to task will be mid-2027.
