Startup Metaspectral Looks to Australia for Catalyst Program

Vancouver based startup Metaspectral, a remote sensing software company, has been accepted into the Venture Catalyst Space at the University of South Australia’s Innovation & Collaboration Centre (ICC).

The five month program started March 1st and has seven startups in this cohort, four from Australia, 1 from India, another jointly from New Zealand/Japan and the Metaspectral. The Catalyst program has featured 29 startups since its inception in 2018.

The ICC states that the State supported program “has a strong history of connecting founders with a global pool of industry experts, including stakeholders from NASA, the Australian Space Agency, Defence SA, Airbus and the Smart SatCRC.”

Francis Doumet, CEO and co-founder of Metaspectral said “our SaaS platform, Fusion, is ideal for real-time compression, transmission, and analysis of hyperspectral imagery from satellites. Hyperspectral imagery contains data from across the electromagnetic spectrum which, when analyzed with artificial intelligence (AI), can be used to monitor time-sensitive environmental events on Earth such as wildfires, methane leaks, and more. The same data can also be leveraged by the defence industry for real-time intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance.”

Metaspectral CTO, Migel Tissera, said in comments for an ICC story, that the company plans on creating an “Australian office, staffed with Australians.” He also said “We are generating revenue – both in Canada and the US – and Australia would benefit from having novel but mature technology incorporated into its space and defence assets.”

Tissera has connections to Australia having completed his Ph.D. and Bachelor’s degrees from the University of South Australia.

Tissera also stated that “I believe that we can bring significant value to the nascent local commercial space market with the years of research behind our space-ready technology. Especially with Kanyini including a hyperspectral payload, there is potential for our software to immediately provide value and be used by SmartSat CRC for managing, distributing, and analyzing the data.”

Kanyini is the first satellite designed and constructed in South Australia and which is set to launch this year. Kanyini will include a hyperspectral imaging payload, and will be managed and operated by the SmartSat Cooperative Research Centre (CRC).

Here is the 2023 cohort:

AICRAFT Adelaide, Australia	Innovative low-power edge computing module for 24/7 cloud computing at any orbit with ultra-fast AI data processing.
Guerin Technologies Bangalore, India	Lightweight and compact space-deployable antennas for satellites, that significantly reduce the cost of space launches.
Metaspectral Vancouver, Canada	Using edge computing and AI to detect materials and chemical compositions that are otherwise invisible to conventional cameras and the human eye.
Paladin Space Adelaide, Australia	Developing reusable satellites that collect and eliminate space debris, increasing the safety of astronauts and mitigating costly damage to space infrastructure.
Robinson Aerospace Systems South Australia	Robinson Aerospace is developing RASCube, an educational satellite kit that is designed to look, feel, function and assemble just like a real CubeSat, but not go into space.
Skyspec New Zealand/Japan	SkySpec is detecting and continuously monitoring hazardous chemicals in the air on land and in water using the latest satellite data acquisition technologies combined with artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques.
Team 3 Adelaide, Australia	Team 3 have developed the DISA (Data Intelligence, Search & Analysis) platform to conduct operations in information and space domains.