Startup in Space: Skybox Imaging Raises $70M to revolutionize Satellite Imagery

San Francisco:  Skybox Imaging announced they had raised $70 million (US) in Series C financing. Led by Canaan Partners and Norwest Venture Partners, including Bessemer Venture Partners and CrunchFund.  Khosla Ventures was involved in this round after financing Skybox in their Series A $3 million (US) and Series B $18 million (US) – Bessemer Venture Partners was involved in Series B as well.

What is Skybox Imaging? From their website:

Skybox Imaging is a commercial remote sensing startup seeking to revolutionize access to information that describes the daily activity on our planet. Founded in 2009, Skybox is designing, manufacturing, and operating the world’s first coordinated constellation of high-resolution microsatellites in order to deliver timely imagery and video of any spot in the world. Skybox headquarters is in Mountain View, California.  For more information, please visitwww.skyboximaging.com and follow Skybox Imaging on Twitter.

Basically they seem to have come up with “micro-satellites” which they will use in an extraterrestrial network of many micro-satellites. They have found a way to cut the costs involved in satellite production and operation by very significant margin and thus have likely been able to gain a number of significant clients from Big Government, Relief Organizations, perhaps Google*.  As Michael Arrington said over on his site

If a company was able to do that, and put a satellite into space at a small fraction of the current cost, they’d likely be able to lock down a number of high profile customers for a variety of previously cost-prohibitive applications. Confidentiality agreements and U.S. export regulations might prohibit that company from disclosing much, or any, of that information.

But investors would obviously have access to that information. You can draw your own conclusions as to why the company is hiring big data engineers in droves…”

Going to the site I was unable to glean any idea who the actual customers are though the different industries and applications were listed.  From their site:

Industries

Humanitarian:

Use Cases

Evacuation planning
Human rights monitoring
Emergency response
Damage assessment
Refugee movements
Recovery coordination
Rebuilding efforts
International response
Political awareness and action
Validate eyewitness reports

APPLICATIONS

Change Detection:

Use Cases

Ice flow movement
Deforestation
Urban encroachment
Invasive species monitoring
Pollution
Drought
Coastal erosion
Military aggression
Earthquake damage
Rainforest clear cutting

On the Skybox Imaging blog they feature a Ted Greenwald article from Forbes which includes these two snippets,

Starting in late 2012, the 55-person company based in Mountain View, California, will launch a private constellation designed to deliver orbital photos as a service: Just log in, enter a credit card number, and grab a timely shot of any spot on Earth. Unlike Google, Bing, or MapQuest, Skybox images will be updated every eight hours.

and

The company views its system as a platform, like an iPhone, on which developers can build next-gen commercial and consumer applications.

This is an incredibly ambitious yet useful idea.  Make it so that the average consumer might be able to digitally recreate views with up-to-date satellite imagery.  Small NGO’s could theoretically become more agile and potentially avoid dangerous situations for their employees and volunteers.  This truly could usher in an entire new wave of innovation in the mapping markets.  This will be a startup we keep our eyes on.

sources: Uncrunched and Skybox Imaging

*SPECULATION BY THE AUTHOR

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