Our Investment into Slingshot
Entrepreneurs are constantly trying to convince investors how some technology or product they created is going to have a major impact on the world. Often, we demo the product ourselves, which gives us a more tangible sense of a product’s potential. Then there are the rare occasions when we get to see, first-hand, just how big of an impact a product will have.
Slingshot provides scalable analysis of remote sensing images and videos from satellites, airplanes, and drones across a number of different industries and use cases. In August 2017, Hurricane Harvey hit Houston, becoming the wettest hurricane on record in the US. After a four-day period it had caused catastrophic flooding. The resulting floods inundated hundreds, upon thousands of homes, displacing more than 30,000 people, and prompting more than 17,000 rescues. It was against this backdrop that we were provided the opportunity to see what the founders of Slingshot had developed.
Rewind the tape several months prior to Harvey’s devastation when we had the pleasure of meeting David, Melanie, and Thomas when they had just started the Techstars LA accelerator program. We were immediately impressed with David’s poise and experience as well as Melanie and Thomas’s technical expertise. Melanie and Thomas worked together while in the Air Force and focused on space operations and intelligence. Their job was to develop and use satellite capabilities to maximize decision advantage for the Department of Defense. In other words, their job was to be that person in all those spy movies that used satellites to figure out what was going on. We pretty much pictured Melanie playing that role in a real-life Jason Bourne movie prior to Slingshot.
When we first met them, they were only a couple months into running the business. They had no customers, and barely a beta product. Fast forward to a month later and that early product was put to the ultimate test. Once Harvey hit, Slingshot partnered with BAE Systems to provide the technology needed to support Team Rubicon’s relief efforts and determine the extent of the flooding and its severity using real time satellite imagery. Slingshot’s algorithms were able to determine how deep the flooding was in various areas, highlight dry areas in order to provide optimal locations to set up staging locations, determine the fastest viable routes to hospitals and enable first responders and medical crews to safely reach those in need. An incredible amount of value for a company that was testing out its MVP!
What was really impressive was that we remember talking with the team shortly after the hurricane hit. They had stayed up all weekend, working nonstop to provide real time support, writing new algorithms and building new functionality. They were nimble, decisive, responsive, and dedicate to helping others in dire need. They didn’t do this because they were paid to, they did it because they knew they had built a technology that could help get the job done. Not surprisingly, that effort led to numerous partners wanting to work with Slingshot even though the company was only a few months old. Of course, Slingshot isn’t just for disaster relief, that was just an example of the power of the technology and the team behind it. Insurance companies are using Slingshot to identify changes and risk in their portfolio. This helps insurance companies identify risks sooner, resulting in significant cost savings and better customer satisfaction. Government and Defense companies are leveraging Slingshot’s platform for geospatial capabilities and analytic judgment for military operations. Other companies are taking advantage of their machine learning and computer vision for better strategic and financial decision-making.
Two weeks ago the company officially announced its seed round. Brett and I could not be more excited about the opportunity to invest in and work with David, Melanie, and Thomas as they continue to grow this company.
