WASHINGTON – Geospatial intelligence company Ursa Space raised $16 million in a Series C investment round led by Dorilton Ventures.
Existing investors who participated in the round include Razor’s Edge Ventures, RRE Ventures and Paladin Capital Group.
Ursa creates products and services with data from electro-optical, synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and radio frequency monitoring constellations. With funding from the round announced March 21 at the Satellite 2022 Conference, Ursa will expand its staff and invest in speeding up delivery of analysis-ready satellite data, Adam Maher, Ursa CEO and founder, told SpaceNews.
The importance of SAR, which collects data in all weather conditions, day and night, is being demonstrated by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Early this month, Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s Minister of Digital Transformation, asked on Twitter for commercial SAR to track the movement of Russian troops and vehicles at night and through pervasive cloud cover.
While government agencies were early adopters of SAR, Ursa is expanding its sales organization that supports emerging markets for Earth-observation data like supply chain optimization, logistics and insurance. SAR is essential for observing ports and oil storage facilities around, which are often obscured by clouds, Maher said.
Since it was founded in 2014, Ursa has focused on easing access to satellite data and analytics. The company tasks, collects and processes data from hundreds of Earth-observation satellites.
Ursa provides access to more than 16 million images, including more than 10 million SAR images, through the Amazon Web Services Data Exchange.
