UrtheCast is yet another company to recently benefit from a contribution from the Canadian Space Agency’s (CSA) latest Space Technology Development Program (STDP) funding round. In the case of UrtheCast, it received one of the larger contributions, $999,916. That news was announced on June 30th. However, subsequent to the award the company on Friday, September 4th filed for court protection with the Supreme Court of British Columbia.
UrtheCast CSA contributions
Urthecast, a Vancouver based company, has been focused on developing a suite of geospatial and geoanalytics tools and had hoped to build a small constellation of Earth observation satellites. The contribution from the CSA was for further development of its UrthePlatform Analytics Engine.
UrtheCast has received two similar awards in last years STDP round. The first was for “automated calibration and validation of optical satellite constellations”, which they used to develop technologies for their UrtheDaily Constellation — which aims to use a constellation of 6 satellites to capture “scientific grade and analytics-ready imagery” of the entire earth every day, at the same time of day. The second award was for “A Novel Self-Cueing TCPED Cycle for High Resolution Wide Swath SAR Imaging”, which was used to develop their Synthetic Aperature Radar that will help Canada with maritime surveillance activities.
This year’s award is to help Urthecast develop the UrthePlatform Analytics Engine, which is a data processing and management platform that can take the immense amount of data that the UrtheDaily Constellation would produce and ensure that it’s accessible and valuable to end-users. In an email exchange with SpaceQ — one that took place one day prior to the announcement about creditor protection — Urthecast CEO Don Osborne explained that the Engine would automatically generate what Osborne calls “Analytics Ready Data (ARD)” of very high radiometric and geometric accuracy that, Osborne said, “can be fed into Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning (AI/ML) algorithms without humans in the loop.” It would also provide a platform that would enable “easy and efficient access to the ARD and [bring] together the various data sets needed to create the needed information products and services.”
SpaceQ tried to contact Osborne again after the company filed for court protection but did not have its inquiries returned.
Seeking court protection
On September 4, UrtheCast announced that they were granted an initial order under the Companies’ Creditors Arrangement Act (the “CCAA”) by the Supreme Court of British Columbia seeking court protection from their creditors. The company will be soliciting new investors and possible buyers for its “core and non-core assets” as well as securing new short-term financing for the company, and long-term financing for whichever projects remain after the sales process. SpaceQ has already reported on UrtheCast’s past financial issues, and about how UrtheCast has gone through “major restructuring” and began the process of selling its Deimos Imaging subsidiary. This news suggests that more drastic changes may be coming.
The press release stated that the financial difficulties were due to two factors. The first factor is familiar to everyone by now: COVID-19 has made it difficult for any company to get financing at the moment, even ones in the booming space sector — as well as making it difficult for them to collect receivables and complete milestones for their projects. The other stated factor was difficulty in meeting funding requirements for UrtheDaily and delays in completing the engineering contract for their previously-announced OptiSAR project. When announced, both were slated to be concluded in 2020, but UrtheDaily had already been pushed back to 2022, and it appears that UrtheCast’s contribution to OptiSAR faces similar difficulties.
UrtheCast does still have potential. If they succeed in launching the UrtheDaily and Analytics Engine projects, Osborne pointed out that no other company in the industry will provide the “satellite-to-AI pipeline” that Urthecast could. Downstream users would have access to a tremendous amount of useful data, without needing to concern themselves with normalization, and could “focus on building real-world applications” for what Osborne described as “enterprise grade change detection allowing automated monitoring and insights on a daily global level.”
In turn, investors may see the CSA’s ongoing investments as a governmental vote of confidence in UrtheCast. As we (hopefully) move closer to a post-COVID-19 world, UrtheCast could stabilize: their pre-COVID interview with SpaceQ pointed to engagement “signed NDA’s and engaged with more than a dozen potential lenders and investors,” and they had a steady stream of announcements of financing prior to the pandemic reaching Canada.
But, in the here-and-now, UrtheCast’s future remains uncertain.