SAR SATELLITE COMPANIES DOING ANALYSIS
Icye’s Website is offing services for analysis “READY FOR DEEP LEARNING” automated access to EO data optimized for AI analytics. Offering object detection, target tracking, activity monitoring activity, environmental conditions classification. Iceye’s EO data and analytics services enable all that, both day and night, regardless of weather conditions.
A publicly traded company out of Vancouver, UrtheCast (pronounced “EarthCast”) does a little bit of everything in satellite data. The company makes most of its money from selling satellite imagery and even video from its own satellites and space-based cameras, with ambitious plans to launch two separate satellite constellations in the future. (
American space-based radar for your defense, intelligence and analytics solutions. Umbra Lab is developing synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellites to deliver sub-meter resolution imagery as a service. Their space-based radar can capture images day and night regardless of weather conditions, for delivery via an integrated web platform. Unclear if Umbra Lab plans to do internal analytics but is the only new space start up offering sub-meter images which are very appealing customers using SAR data.
Smaller is not only better but it’s cheaper. That’s the theory behind a satellite data company from Palo Alto founded only last year—Capella Space. The company raised $12 million in a Series A in May, its first round of disclosed funding. Capella co-founder Payam Banazadeh emphasizes that while his company builds satellites, it considers itself an information business and they will not be selling “pixels”. (
Companies doing Analysis with SAR
The Descartes Labs Platform is the missing link in making satellite imagery useful. They collect data daily from public and commercial SAR imagery providers, clean it, calibrate it, and store it in an easy-to-access file system, ready for scientific analysis. Descartes also just rased a $30M Series B.
Another company attempting to commercialize SAR technology is New York-based Ursa Space Systems. The company only has about $350,000 in disclosed funding and relies on existing SAR imagery from satellite now in orbit. Its main products include a weekly time series on oil stocks down to the tank level, a service also provided by companies like the better funded Orbital Insight. (
One of the “standard” products offered these days by satellite data companies is business intelligence based on imagery from parking lots and other economic indicators of commerce. San Francisco-based Spaceknow is among that breed but offers a range of other products, based on its machine-learning platform. (
The other major players are MDA, European Space Agency, Tele-Rilevamento Europa, CGG, GroundProbe, ESA Earth Online, Gamma Remote Sensing, Alaska Satellite Facility, 3vGeomatics, SkyGeo, TRE ALTAMIRA, TERRASIGNA.
Photo Credit: UrtheCast