Satellite intelligence startup announces $2.6m funding

Bird.i, a startup collating and disseminating a satellite, airborne and drone imagery in real-time to provide insights and data to global businesses, has closed a $2.6m investment round.

The funding, led by Accelerated Digital Ventures (ADV), also comes from new investor, Concrete VC, as well as previous backers Frontline Ventures, Satellite Application Catapult Services and Scottish Investment Bank.

This most recent round brings the startup’s total funding to $3.3m (around £2.5m) and will enable it to scale its product portfolio and continue to expand globally.

Bird.i’s founder, Corentin Guillo, a French entrepreneur, said: “Bird.i’s ethos is that the important information found in images taken from space and our skies should be made more accessible, affordable and useable for all, to help businesses and individuals see a more accurate picture of our ever-changing world.

“This additional investment will enable us to continue developing our technology, grow the company and expand our product portfolio.”

By applying proprietary artificial intelligence and computer vision techniques - such as unsupervised learning and similarity search - to the company’s imagery and data, Bird.i extracts insights supposedly at a much greater scale than the human eye, in order to answer business needs and questions.

Customers who currently use Bird.i include business intelligence and investment firms, infrastructure operators, urban planners and facility managers. The company’s client base includes Thomson Reuters, an early adopter of Bird.i technology, which has integrated the service into its construction intelligence platform in order to track building projects in detail.

Michael Dimelow, head of investment at ADV, commented: “With Bird.i’s machine learning-powered image processing, a clear and refined view of the world is now accessible to businesses globally, and in a resolution never before achieved outside of military applications.

“Companies can now make real-time decisions about the progress of major construction and infrastructure projects, or the whereabouts of globally distributed assets such as fleets of vessels, or quantify barrels of oil reserves.”

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