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SAN FRANCISCO – Singapore startup Eartheye Space raised $1.5 million in pre-seed funding to expand its online satellite-tasking platform.
Eartheye Space, founded in 2022, calls itself the “Uber Eats” of Earth-observation data. Uber Eats can deliver food from multiple restaurants and Eartheye Space “can combine any of the 475-plus satellites across all the sensor modalities,” Eartheye Space founder and CEO Shankar Sivaprakasam told SpaceNews. “You can task them together in the same workflow.”
With the recent investment, Eartheye Space “will be expanding into Africa and the Middle East next, followed by the USA in 2025,” Sivaprakasam said.
The latest funding also will help Eartheye Space gain access to additional data sources, expand its staff and continue training computer-vision and machine-learning algorithms.
Assorted Sensors
Eartheye Space helps customers task a variety of satellite sensors. The network includes multispectral, hyperspectral, synthetic aperture radar, thermal infrared, greenhouse gas, full-motion video, automatic identification systems and radio frequency sensors.
Once data is acquired, Eartheye Space relies on computer vision and machine learning to draw insights.
“You task a satellite, and you get the data,” Sivaprakasam said. “Within two to three minutes, we extract the information from the data and tell you the information of interest to you.”
For Navy customers, the pertinent information may be transshipment in the South China Sea. A customer focused on deforestation could obtain “pictures of deforestation day or night, but also information on how much area is being deforested and the loss of biomass because of deforestation,” Sivaprakasam said.
Startup Investors
Tech investors, family offices and high-net-worth individuals particpated in the funding round. Investors include hedge fund founder Sir David Harding and startup advisor Joshua Kennedy-White, backed Eartheye Space.
“This investment not only validates our vision of transforming how intelligence from space is rapidly gathered and used by our customers but empowers us to accelerate our mission,” Sivaprakasam, former Planet vice president for the Asia Pacific and Japan, said in a statement.
EarthEye Space has participated in Seraphim Space and Creative Destruction Lab accelerators.
Debra Werner is a correspondent for SpaceNews based in San Francisco.Debra earned a bachelor’s degree in communications from the University of California, Berkeley, and a master’s degree in Journalism from Northwestern University. She…More by Debra Werner
