An Earth observation startup – Iceye – announced on February 27 that it has taken on board two new vice presidents. The startup that has its headquarters in Helsinki has hired the new VPs to help its customers get access to the imagery from its existing Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) satellites. Leola Moss was hired as the vice president of Iceye’s operations and product delivery department, while Steve Young has been hired as the vice president of its sales and business development department.
Iceye is in the process of expanding its staff as it starts selling data from its SAR microsatellite Iceye-X2 that was launched on SpaceX Falcon 9 rideshare mission on December 3. The startup is also setting up to launch in 2019 five SAR satellites.
Iceye’s chief executive Rafal Modrzewski said that as per the company’s plan, Iceye’s commercial operations are growing. He added that as the company is launching new satellites, their capacity of SAR imaging is growing as well. Young and Moss are here to help the customers with the rising pace of the radar imaging and the volume that their teams are delivering, he said. Modrzewski said that they are progressing very quickly from thousands to hundreds of thousands of frames each year.
Young who had earlier worked for Earth-i, Surrey Satellite Technology Limited and BAE Systems said that this is an apt time to get in people like him to push data into the marketplace, to increase awareness and make international customers understand how they can use this service. Moss, who had previously worked for Google and Planet, said that she will be focusing on reliable and timely data delivery. With the addition of new satellites to their system, more automation and complexity has entered the process and that is where she comes in to make sure the factory is running all the time, added Moss.