EarthDaily buys analytics specialist amid imagery constellation deployment delay

TAMPA, Fla. — Antarctica Capital has sold geospatial analytics provider Descartes Labs to EarthDaily Analytics (EDA), a company the private equity firm also owns, which has delayed its optical imagery constellation by two years to improve artificial intelligence compatibility.

Vancouver, Canada-based EDA said Oct. 15 it had bought Descartes Lab of Santa Fe, New Mexico, for an undisclosed sum to strengthen AI imagery analytics offerings in the insurance, energy, mining, and U.S. defense markets.

Antarctica formed EDA in 2021 after buying satellite designs, software, customer contracts and intellectual property during UrtheCast’s restructuring process.

A year later, EDA picked Loft Orbital to build, launch and operate a fleet of 10 Earth-observation satellites on its behalf in 2023.

However, SpaceX is currently slated to launch the satellites to low Earth orbit in 2025, EDA said in the Oct. 15 news release.

Incoming improvements

“The EarthDaily Constellation will substantially exceed the performance standards of [Europe’s] Sentinel 2 — the current gold standard for Commercial EO data,” said EDA CEO Don Osborne, who now leads the combined group, via email to SpaceNews.

“Accordingly, it is a highly complex & dynamic process. We have worked with our customers, our internal team & our subcontractors to make improvements in the functionality, testing, & production to make continuous improvements that meet & exceed the original design. As a result, the timeline has shifted.”  

These improvements include “reinforcing consistency and quality of the data stream to be optimized for AI,” he added, reducing the need for labor-intensive manual intervention and scrubbing.

Switzerland’s ABB is contracted to provide multispectral imagers that could capture data in 22 spectral bands for the fleet, designed to cover 98% of Earth’s landmass with a resolution down to five meters.

Loft Orbital is using modified 200-kilogram OneWeb satellite broadband platforms for the constellation that it ordered from Airbus.

Some of the satellites are due to be assembled at Airbus facilities in Toulouse, France, and others in Merritt Island, Florida, where Airbus runs an automated production factory.

While waiting for its own constellation, EDA has been offering analytics via third-party satellites, such as Sentinel, mainly to insurance and agriculture customers.

More acquisitions?

According to EDA, buying Descartes Labs also strengthens its position as a platform for future geospatial acquisitions, enabling access to a broader range of customers.

“We see that there are numerous potential opportunities in the market where EDA’s upstream technology, and in particular the forthcoming EarthDaily Constellation, could create very real synergies with existing businesses,” Osborne said.

“Additionally, while our strategy is to be very selective in extending into only the most high-value, high-growth downstream segments, we do see certain horizontal synergies with [Descartes Labs] and potentially beyond that are very appealing and that meaningfully break the mold from the way that business is typically done in Earth Observation.”

EDA and Descartes Labs employed 180 and 65 people, respectively, before the transaction, and the group said it does not expect to announce significant job losses following their integration.

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