Orbital Insight, a Palo Alto, CA-based geospatial big data company, raised $20m in funding.
The $15m Series B round was led by GV (formerly Google Ventures), with participation from CME Ventures, and existing investors Sequoia Capital, Lux Capital, and Bloomberg Beta. A $5m investment was made from In-Q-Tel.
The company intends to use the funds to continue refining its ability to extract analysis from satellite imagery, improving its ability to monitor the global oil supply, to expand its range of detectable signals, and to continue hiring talent in the machine vision and data science fields.
Led by Dr. James Crawford, founder and CEO, Orbital Insight has developed algorithms to count and measure cars, roads, airplanes, clouds, haze, freshwater lakes, agricultural fields, buildings, and oil tanks to provide an understanding of the world quantitatively grounded in observation.
To obtain its imagery, the company has developed partnerships with the companies operating the largest five satellite constellations in the world, including DigitalGlobe, Airbus, Planet Labs, Rapid Eye, and Urthecast. These contracts grant access to petabytes of imagery, and allow Orbital to test and develop algorithms on a higher volume of imagery than almost any organization in history.
The company currently works with more than 60 asset management firms, several U.S. government agencies, and two global non-profit organizations.
FinSMEs
27/06/2016