UrtheCast Corp. (TSX:UR) (“UrtheCast” or the “Company”), and Land O’ Lakes, Inc., one of the United States’ premier agribusiness and food companies, today announced a long-term agreement for GEOSYS, a Land O’Lakes subsidiary, to purchase geospatial data from the UrtheDaily Constellation, UrtheCast’s planned constellation of Earth observation satellites which will deliver daily, medium resolution imagery of the entire planet’s landmass*.
By entering this agreement, GEOSYS will become an anchor customer for the UrtheDaily Constellation. GEOSYS, already the UrtheCast group’s largest agricultural customer and one of the world’s leading providers of digital agriculture solutions, will use the data to improve the decision-making processes for their customers globally, including WinField United, the Land O’Lakes crop input business.
“GEOSYS has 30 years of experience in the industry and views this flow of data as a highly innovative technical and commercial game changer for in-season field monitoring,” says Damien Lepoutre, GEOSYS founder and president. “The UrtheDaily Constellation is being built on a heritage of proven technology and is the only solution we’ve seen clearly designed to meet our demanding data requirements. This will dramatically increase the value of decision support tools made available to farmers through our customers. As a result, we are committed to helping UrtheCast bring UrtheDaily to market.”
The UrtheCast group has worked collaboratively with GEOSYS in recent years – along with customers operating in such diverse sectors as water management, insurance, municipal planning, finance and defense and intelligence – to conceptualize and design the UrtheDaily Constellation. The Constellation, expected to be comprised of eight Earth observation satellites, is designed to capture medium-resolution imagery of the Earth’s entire landmass (excluding Antarctica) every day, producing machine learning-ready, scientific-grade data to help geoanalytics companies measure and monitor change on our planet, and ultimately help to address some of Earth’s biggest challenges, at scale. Providing the UrtheDaily dataset to GEOSYS will enable their customers to make more profitable and agronomically sound decisions.
“We are honored to announce GEOSYS as the UrtheDaily anchor customer for agriculture,” stated Wade Larson, UrtheCast’s President and CEO. “The selection of UrtheDaily by GEOSYS, a pioneer in digital agriculture, validates our belief that UrtheDaily is the remote-sensing constellation of choice for the sophisticated geoanalytics market. We at UrtheCast are extremely pleased to partner with an organization that shares many of our core values and ambitions as we look to jointly harness the capabilities of UrtheDaily to tackle some of the world’s most pressing issues.”
Under the terms of the agreement, payments will be made as soon as UrtheCast begins delivering UrtheDaily Constellation data to GEOSYS, subject to UrtheCast arranging its financing for the build and launch of the UrtheDaily Constellation, and other customary covenants for agreements of this nature.
* With the exception of Antarctica
About GEOSYS
GEOSYS is the first global digital agriculture company founded by agronomists. With 30 years of industry experience, GEOSYS provides clients with data, analysis and insights needed to make more informed decisions. Services range from worldwide risk management and monitoring agricultural commodities to input sales and precision farming support by using the latest research in agronomics, information technologies and remote sensing. GEOSYS also develops highly customized business solutions for large, multinational agricultural companies. Acquired by Land O’Lakes, Inc. in 2013 as an independent business, GEOSYS is headquartered in Minneapolis, Minnesota with offices in France, Switzerland, Australia, and Brazil. For more information, visit www.geosys.com.
About UrtheCast Corp.
UrtheCast Corp. is a Vancouver-based technology company that serves the rapidly evolving geospatial and geoanalytics markets with a wide range of information-rich products and services. The Company currently operates four Earth Observation sensors in space, including two cameras aboard the International Space Station and two satellites, Deimos-1 and Deimos-2. Imagery and video data captured by these sensors is downlinked to ground stations across the planet and displayed on the UrthePlatform, or distributed directly to partners and customers. UrtheCast is also developing and anticipates launching the world’s first fully-integrated constellation of multispectral optical and SAR satellites, called OptiSAR™, in addition to its proposed UrtheDaily™ Constellation, which the Company believes will together revolutionize monitoring of our planet with high-quality, medium and high-resolution, and high-coverage and high-revisit imagery in all weather conditions, any time of day. Common shares of UrtheCast trade on the Toronto Stock Exchange as ticker ‘UR’.
For more information, visit UrtheCast’s website at www.urthecast.com.
