Antarctica Capital, a private equity firm, today announced the formation of EarthDaily Analytics, a new Vancouver based company born from the insolvency of UrtheCast.
The company looks very similar to its predecessor, minus some assets, notably its Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) technology which was acquired by Alpha Insights earlier this year. Alpha Insights’ CEO is Scott Larson a former director and co-founder of UrtheCast who left the company in December of 2015. A spokesperson for the company said they now have 110 people globally working for the company, down from the over 180 before its insolvency.
Antarctica Capital did not state today how much of an investment they made in getting EarthDaily set up. The company had acquired some of the assets and intellectual property from insolvent UrtheCast.
Chandra Patel, Managing Director of Antarctica Capital, said, “we carefully evaluated participating in this dynamic industry sector and are very excited to build this new platform. We believe the company has unique competitive advantages and is well positioned to be an industry leader with its focus upon leveraging its software and data analytics as a service platform, driven by AI and machine learning. We share the management team’s vision for growth and look forward to our partnership with them to bring these plans to life and create value for their customers.”
EarthDaily is planning on building upon what UrtheCast had started in developing a constellation of earth observation satellites. They expect production to begin mid-year and operational by 2023. The constellation “will provide proprietary global data infrastructure from EarthDaily’s owned satellites.” The number of satellites in the constellation has not been released yet.
The senior management team of EarthDaily remains the same with Don Osborne, CEO, Sai Chu, Chief Financial Officer, Dr. Dave Gebhardt, Senior VP and General Manager, Dr. George Tyc, Chief Technology Officer, and Chris Rampersad, VP of Engineering.
Don Osborne said, “EarthDaily’s collection processing, and distribution of ultra-high-quality data provides unprecedented value by optimizing the ability to reliably gather information from satellite imagery and quickly process at scale for various commercial markets. Use of technology in the agriculture industry optimizes production and improves sales and profitability and we want to be at the forefront of that expanding opportunity. We are excited to partner with Antarctica Capital to realize the transformative potential of our technology.”
Mr. Patel added, “We look forward to providing management operational support and technical oversight by applying the expertise of the Antarctica Data Partners team. As we move forward with the company’s new constellation of satellites with state-of-the-art imaging technology, we see tremendous opportunity enabled by combining the company’s software and data analytics platform with the new satellite constellation. This combination will permit the company to offer its customers unparalleled frequency and affordability of data and allow it to expand beyond agriculture into multiple untapped verticals including ESG and Defense and Intelligence.”
Update – 1:35 p.m. EDT: The company provided an updated figure as to how many people work at the company.