Our Investment in Arlula: Unlocking the full potential of Earth Observation data

The advent of EO data

Since the first earth observation images were taken from space in the 1950–60s, satellite based remote-sensing has captured a wealth of invaluable data and pushed forward our understanding of the planet. Satellites have a unique vantage point for capturing change across our world and offer an unparalleled perspective on the dynamic transformations occurring across the globe. Today, EO data is quickly emerging as one of our most important data sources to enable new analytics and insights across a wide variety of applications. But there’s a problem.

The challenges with EO data access

Although the amount of EO data being captured has grown rapidly, the data infrastructure needed to store, process and distribute this data has not kept up. There continues to be friction that makes acquiring and using EO data challenging.

When we spoke with customers and stakeholders, we consistently heard many of the same pain points:

• The process of accessing high quality EO data from commercial providers is slow and painful, that is if they ever get back to you.
• Data from different providers and assets are not always standardized or in sufficiently Analysis-Ready (ARD) form to be useful.
• Sophisticated users usually need data from multiple suppliers for analytics, which is made exponentially more painful due to the hurdles above.
• Both end users of data and satellite operators need more streamlined ways of managing and distributing their data that is both cost effective and easily scalable.

These roadblocks have been drastically holding back the potential of what can be achieved with EO data and it’s time for that to change.

Introducing Arlula

When we first met Sebastian & Arran, we were intrigued by their passion for solving this problem. The more we learned about their approach, the more excited we got about how transformative an offering like Arlula’s could be to the EO industry.

Arlula’s next generation data platform gives users seamless access to EO data from a broad range of high quality commercial providers. Not only that, their freemium EO Catalog Browser approach, combined with API access and ‘Geostack’ data management offerings, gives both data users and data suppliers what we believe is the most compelling and scalable offering in the market today.

We’re excited for Arlula to take the power of EO data to the next level across multiple sectors, from environmental and climate monitoring, to resource management, urban planning, infrastructure development, insurance, natural disaster response, and the list goes on.

We couldn’t be more proud to have led Arlula’s $2.2m Seed round to supercharge their growth and aspirations, and are thrilled to be a part of their journey. We are right in the midst of the next wave of growth in the global space industry, and we firmly believe that Arlula’s innovative approach to Earth observation is poised to drive meaningful change across the EO sector.

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