SAN FRANCISCO, CA. – SpaceKnow Inc., today announced the company has raised $4 million in Series A financing led by BlueYard Capital and previously existing investor Reflex Capital. This investment brings the company’s total funds raised to approximately $5.5 million. Jason Whitmire, Partner at BlueYard, will join the Board of Directors. The funding will be used to further develop the SpaceKnow Artificial Intelligence software for economic monitoring, increase hiring and scale up its worldwide operations and sales forces in the U.S., Europe and Asia.
Launched in 2013, with the goal of using analytics to bring transparency to the global economy by tracking economic trends from space, SpaceKnow is now the leading provider of targeted industrial and geographical intelligence. SpaceKnow distributes the China Satellite Manufacturing Index™ and the Africa Night Lights Index to all 350,000 subscribers of a premier financial services company. The company is currently building an indexing artificial intelligence that will scan, understand and describe every square inch of the Earth surface daily using satellite imagery. SpaceKnow believes this radical initiative will usher in a new era of “accessible transparency” which will increase global prosperity, security and peace.
“I am delighted to welcome BlueYard Capital into our SpaceKnow family. We are hard at work to bring deep learning artificial intelligence-driven transparency obtained from satellite imagery to a wide market, and build upon our success in the finance, defense and construction verticals,” said Pavel Machalek, Co-Founder of SpaceKnow. “The tireless efforts of our outstanding engineers and scientists, together with the support of our new investors, will continue to allow SpaceKnow to provide our customers a level of insight that few other analytics companies can compete with.”
“We believe SpaceKnow is uniquely positioned to sustainably produce highly specific, unbiased knowledge of socio-economic, environmental and defense trends that paint a fuller picture of the performance of one company, an entire industry or even governments and economies,” said Jason Whitmire, Partner at BlueYard. “This will allow them to not only build a large and viable analytics business, but also have the opportunity to develop brand new applications that haven’t even been thought of yet.”
“The geo-analytics space frontier is far from decided and we believe the company that can best tackle highly specialized unique data sets through advanced deep-learning frameworks with proprietary algorithms, and can efficiently process satellite image data from multiple Earth Observation providers, will win,” said Ondrej Fryc, Founder and Partner at Reflex Capital. “We strongly believe SpaceKnow is that company.”
Integral to the current trajectory of growth for SpaceKnow has been its partnership with DigitalGlobe, a trusted provider of highly accurate geospatial data. Shay Har-Noy, VP and General Manager, Platform at DigitalGlobe, stated, “We are thrilled to see the continued traction SpaceKnow is seeing among customers and investors. SpaceKnow is a key element of DigitalGlobe’s GBDX ecosystem where their products and innovation are helping to make analysis of the planet from high resolution imagery accessible to new markets at a scale like never before. While we are only at the beginning, it is clear the future is looking extremely bright.”
About SpaceKnow
Founded in 2013 in San Francisco, CA, SpaceKnow’s mission is to provide transparent access and analysis of satellite imagery to the world. SpaceKnow’s team of imaging scientists and software engineers measure and anticipate events by analyzing patterns in the imagery data. SpaceKnow’s capabilities include developing products for monitoring economic activity for a wide variety of both consumer and enterprise clients across all major industries.
