Announcing our Investment in Descartes Labs
With the introduction of low cost shoebox-sized cube satellites and the public release of government-funded satellite imagery over the web together has created a surge in new images of our planet coming online. This rapid growth of satellite image datasets has occurred in tandem with the scale-out potential of cloud infrastructure, which forms the basis for a novel opportunity in geospatial analytics. Descartes Labs, led by CEO Mark Johnson, is a Crosslink portfolio company based in New Mexico taking advantage of this massive data opportunity by building predictive models for organizations to make better business decisions.
Crosslink led a seed round in Descartes Labs in December 2014. At the time, we had known Mark from his prior startup, Zite, which sold to CNN (and later Flipboard). Mark came to Crosslink with some incredible technology and scientists he had come across from the Los Alamos National Lab in New Mexico, and some ambitious plans for how he might build a business around it. Admittedly, in the early days, Descartes was still exploring what the best use cases were for its technology. In fact, fusing satellite imagery data into agriculture use cases (Descartes’s primary product in market today) was just one item on a long list of potential commercial opportunities for the technology. However, with Mark and his team’s persistence and resilience, they were able to build what is becoming a game-changing product in the field of geospatial intelligence. They are building a data refinery.

Today, Descartes Labs works with an agricultural conglomerate, Cargill, as well as other customers in food & ag, financial markets, and government. They are building a platform that we hope to be the go-to destination for all satellite imagery datasets and the resulting advanced analytical models that can be built on top of these valuable data to improve decision making.
As announced this week, Descartes Labs has raised a $30M Series B led by March Capital. This is a monumental milestone for the company and we couldn’t be more excited about what the future holds. Congratulations to Mark Johnson and the Descartes Labs team for this accomplishment!
