Less than a year after EarthDaily Analytics was reborn from the insolvency of UrtheCast, the company is reporting strong growth both in Canada and internationally.
The Vancouver, B.C. based data and analytics company is readying to launch its own set of satellites in 2023 to build on its customer base, which seeks rapid and easy-to-interpret satellite data to make decisions on our changing Earth – whether it is concerning global warming, crop management or other facets of surface change.
EarthDaily’s formation was disclosed in April 2021 in an announcement from private equity firm Antarctica Capital. Antarctica has not disclosed how much money to date it has put into the company – the information is not public, SpaceQ was told – but upon acquisition, EarthDaily included some of UrtheCast’s assets and intellectual property.
A notable exception to EarthDaily’s UrtheCast assets was Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) technology, picked up by Alpha Insights earlier in 2021 – but EarthDaily has its own direction. CEO Don Osborne told SpaceQ the main thrust of EarthDaily’s work in the coming years will be building out expertise both in independently owned hardware and analytics.
“We are singularly focused right now on implementation of the EarthDaily constellation,” Osborne said on Tuesday (Jan. 18), the day his company announced mission partners for the forthcoming set of satellites – the first of several such announcements to come, Osborne added.
The lead partner will be Loft Orbital Solutions Inc., which contracted European aerospace giant Airbus to supply satellite buses based on previous satellite lines. In other words, the announcement hints that the buses have been tested on previous space missions, or at the least, during previous development for space missions – indicating precious learned experience from Airbus that will benefit the new constellation.
While EarthDaily now uses data from the European Space Agency’s Sentinel group of satellites, NASA/U.S. Geological Survey’s long-running LandSat series and other undisclosed systems, Osborne says the new constellation is key to their strategy. EarthDaily’s satellites will enhance the revisit time and provide more detailed analytics for their customers, he explained.
The super-spectral satellites will include nine primes and one spare; Antarctica Capital has already disclosed the private equity company will spend $150 million CAD to support construction, which began in September 2021. Notably, the constellation includes short-wave infrared and thermal cameras – details which were announced earlier in the month. Overall, the satellite will include 24 bands of information across visible, shortwave and infrared bands of the spectrum.
“The expected lifetime will be 10 years. These are not short, garbage-can sats, where you send them up and watch them fail,” Osborne said of the 200 kg EarthDaily satellites.
In other words, EarthDaily is taking a different direction than some of its competitors, which prefer to use smaller, less robust satellites in lower orbits to Earth. The upshot of the short-term satellites is they can be replaced quickly at low cost. The downside, though, is they require frequent launches and are prone to failure through aspects like radiation exposure that fries delicate electronics scaled for smallsats – thus Osborne’s allusion to their shorter lifetimes.
Once ready in 2023, the EarthDaily constellation will work directly with the company’s EarthPipeline, an Amazon Web Services-certified software-as-a-service data processing platform.
EarthPipeline uses machine learning to parse the many gigabytes of data flowing from space daily, simplifying work for customers seeking to make timely and information-rich decisions on their assets. It represents EarthDaily’s solution to the perennial problem companies in its area face of too much data flowing to the ground as resolution and revisit times increase on satellites.
“We spent a bucket of money to date” on getting the system ready, Osborne said, adding he cannot disclose financials but can give a sense through employee growth. Eventually, 60 to 100 people should be devoted to EarthPipeline. For context, the company’s overall headcount is around 85 or 90 globally – slightly down from the 110 disclosed at acquisition, but more will be hired and integrated shortly, Osborne said.
Of the overall current-day headcount, roughly 45 people are based in the Canadian office and EarthDaily is “madly hiring” for more in this country, Osborne said; while it’s possible other Canadian offices may be added in the future, Vancouver remains the focus for the time being.
The company also provided a strategic update Jan. 12, a highlight of which was announcing the acquisition of the Geosys agricultural geoanalytics business. The business will be renamed EarthDaily Agro as of Wednesday (Jan. 19), Osborne told SpaceQ.
The strategic update further disclosed “ongoing recruitment” of software engineers for EarthPipeline, and the company’s decision to use a marketing and sales organization to assist customer generation for EarthDaily Agro and the forthcoming EarthDaily constellation services.