Wyvern Space will be receiving a $4 million investment from Sustainable Development Technology Canada (SDTC) as part of a three-year project studying how to reduce domestic agriculture emissions.
STDC revealed the investment on Monday, Feb. 7. In total SDTC announced $52.3 million in funding today going to 16 companies including a consortium led by Wyvern.
Wyvern, creators of hyperspectral imaging satellite technology, were contracted with a consortium of agri-tech and agriculture-focused organizations to conduct the research, including Olds College, BASF Digital Farming GmbH, SkyWatch, MetaSpectral, and Wild + Pine.
Wyvern’s hyperspectral imaging technology uses arrays of small cameras, each gathering data at a specific wavelength, then combines their signals into “images” that are three-dimensional data blocks that can contain large amounts of information right down to the pixel level. Agriculture has been a key potential use case for their technology, and this announcement is another demonstration of how the Government of Canada is taking Wyvern’s technology seriously.
This follows on a series of previous investments in Wyvern by both private and public-sector organizations. Wyvern recently announced that they’d received USD $4.5M in total funding, including both $2.25M from a recent oversubscribed seed round led by MaC Venture Capital, and an earlier combined $2.25M in pre-seed funding and Government of Canada support. They also announced that they will be joining Y Combinator’s Winter 2022 cohort.
SDTC is an “arm’s length” foundation with a mission to support companies that are “leaders in their efforts to develop and demonstrate new environmental technologies that address climate change, clean air, clean water and clean soil”, according to the SDTC site. SDTC President and CEO Leah Lawrence said of the investment that Wyvern’s imaging products “are going to help farmers use less fertilizer, pesticides, and water and help produce bigger yields,” and that “SDTC is proud to support Wyvern in their mission to increase the productivity and sustainability of Canadian farmlands.”
Wyvern CEO Chris Robson said that this funding will help “to get our deployable optics into space for the first time, which is going to unlock significant opportunities for the farmers in our backyard and around the world.” In a conversation with SpaceQ, Robson elaborated, saying that while the funding will not move up their launch schedule — they’re still planning on launching their DragonEye satellites in late 2022 — the funding will give them the opportunity to “prove our imagery’s applicability to not only agricultural applications, but the environmental benefits of doing hyperspectral imagery from space in the agriculture industry.” They’ll be building out use cases, and “doing testing in the field, which will be really good.” (They may also be adding an additional satellite to their planned three-satellite launch, which would be sent into orbit in 2023.)
Robson went into a small amount more detail on the project, saying that they’re focusing on farm research areas in Alberta, and are “working with consortium partners to take images of those areas at a regular cadence during the growing season.” They’ll be combining that information with data from ground-based sensors and information from agronomists to “transform the hyperspectral imagery into a source of predictive information about what’s going to happen.”
The “farm research areas” mentioned by Robson are Olds College’s 2,800 acre “Smart Farm,” distributed across several locations in and around Olds, Alberta. Olds College is using them to “provide a product development and demonstration venue to accelerate agriculture technology and agri-food development.” Olds College’s CTO, Dr. Alex Melnitchouck said that the Smart Farm research will be “an exciting opportunity to explore what cutting-edge satellite technology means for the next chapter of digital innovation in farming and for sustainability in the Ag industry.”