Not Just a Billionaires’ Hobby

This Week in Space: Pivoting, All of the investment this week

Notable Commercial Space Activity: Week of August 25th, 2017

• Helios Wire: Raised $4m to do small satellite based Machine to Machine communications, or in other words Connectivity as a Service for the Industrial Internet of Things. While they are pretty early, they seem to be very well positioned to execute successfully.
• Roofr: Using space as a data source, they provide roofing estimates. Also part of YC Summer 2017. Like Peer to Peer marketplaces, or AI, I think space data will be a really significant driver of innovation, in concert with progressive web technologies over the next several years.
• SpaceVR: The company that brought you the first 4K 360 video from space is now developing tele-operated robotics for terrestrial and eventually space applications. This week they completed another successful demo for the service industry, when the founder made a taco in Mexico City, from San Francisco. What excites me is that they aren’t just going after some big moonshot, they’ve found a profitable path to a long term goal, which alone could be a multi-billion dollar business.
• Descartes Labs: $30M! Just yesterday, Descartes Labs announced the closing of their Series B round, raised to build out a ‘Data Refinery’ for earth observation data.
• MoonshotX: Their Gemini program seems to be designed to teach engineers to think like entrepreneurs, specifically the bay area brand of entrepreneur (rather than a small business owner). I am going to offend some people by saying this, but the traditional engineering approach to entrepreneurship is the biggest impediment to the growth of the space industry, so this program has the potential to be incredibly impactful.
• ICEYE: Raised $13M for their SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar) micro-satellite constellation. What’s interesting about SAR is not only that it unlocks alot of EO data that is unattainable at night, or when there is cloud cover, but also that their data is not necessarily targeted to established consumers of earth observation data (ie Geospatial Analysts). SAR imagery is great for artifically intelligent change or structure detection algorithms.
• Firefly: They’re back, and they’re launching in 2018!

All of this activity is venture backed, or VC focused. People who have a duty to make money for their LPs think these companies will be billion dollar businesses within a decade or so. These aren’t billionaire tech moguls playing around with scaled up model rockets on the weekends.

Disclosure: My statements and opinions are my own, and do not represent those of any organization with which I am associated.