Geospatial Intelligence for a Better World
Academic Research on the Spotlight
Company: AtlasAI
Founded: 2018
Headquarters: San Francisco, California“Improvements in agricultural productivity in developing countries are thought to play a key role in poverty reduction. Unfortunately, such productivity remains poorly measured throughout much of the world, hampering efforts to evaluate and target productivity-enhancing interventions.”
-Marshall Burke, and David Lobell
The Story
AtlasAI emerged as a spin-off from the fantastic work produced at Stanford’s Sustainability and Artificial Intelligence Lab. Three faculty members of the university are behind the project: David Lobell, Marshall Burke, and Stefano Ermon.
With years of experience working in development economics, crop science, remote sensing, and artificial intelligence, the team set their eyes on building a revolutionary analytics platform. The goal would be to generate human development indicators at fine resolution from across the developing world.
The Company
AtlasAI uses satellite technology and artificial intelligence to deliver economic, infrastructure, and agricultural insights to enterprises, governments, and investors. Users can utilize the data to understand patterns in economic well being, community growth and settlement, predict crop yields, and much more.
Through its platform, users can access high-resolution datasets, make visual comparisons, query, and combine data to generate new insights. A core differentiator is that the product is grounded in methods backed by peer-reviewed scientific research, and their models use only gold-standard data published by governments.
The Path Forward
With data and tools of this caliber, the company is set to change, or at least influence, how decisions get made around the global development sector. In April, AtlasAI secured a $7M Series A funding round led by Airbus Ventures. The money will help accelerate product development and amplify the company’s reach to the organizations and communities where such insights are needed. ■
Thank you for reading.
This article is part of Discover This, a mini-series by The Financial Architect that seeks to uncover and showcase some of the most innovative and exciting businesses we've come across.For questions or suggestions related to our content, leave a comment below or message us directly at tfa@avivanco.com.
