As we look ahead to 2023, it’s worth pausing for a moment to reflect on the last 12 months and highlight the steps we have made toward achieving our company goal of building a comprehensive, accessible suite of global monitoring products.
While it’s impossible to know what events will unfold next year, we know that having the ability to monitor certain areas of the world will help improve lives and the planet.
Here are some of the key moments that defined Ursa Space, and demonstrated the type of actionable insights that we can provide to address a range of issues, from humanitarian and environmental crises to conflict and economic
Growth
Series C
We started the year strong by closing our Series C funding led by Dorilton. Ursa Space used the new investment to respond to a significant increase in customer demand for automated, scalable, analysis-ready satellite data. Additionally, expanding field sales organization to support newly emerging markets for earth observation data such as supply chain optimization, logistics, and insurance.
Data Availability
We launched the Ursa Platform, a streamlined process of purchasing SAR data, an announcement noticed by the industry. Customers can also task future imagery through the Platform.
As of today, we currently hold a combined catalog of 30 million images – 11.5 million SAR images and 18.5 million Optical images
On AWS Marketplace, you can find the searchable Image Ordering & Tasking API and the price-predictive Oil Inventory Index among other subscription datasets. Ursa’s Oil Storage & Auto Manufacturing Datasets are available on Google Cloud as well.
Virtual Constellation
Our catalog is the foundation for creating custom analytics and derived insights. To do this, we leverage relationships with an extensive network of vendors with a combined count of over 200 satellites in orbit.
New additions to our Virtual Constellation this year include data fusion partners Satellogic for high-resolution optical imagery, and 4DV who contributes hundreds of modalities into a fused set of insights.
To improve our customer latency in critical areas, we partnered with KT SAT in the Asia Pacific Region and EOSDA in Ukraine. SAOCOM imagery is now available from VENG in Argentina. For Maritime Domain Awareness, we’ve partnered with Spire, Aurora, and Unseenlabs.
Ukraine
Ursa provided humanitarian support in Ukraine by highlighting safe passages to return refugees from neighboring countries and indicating potential threats on land and sea.
We analyzed 40 areas of interest with an average of 1,800 data points per week in this process. Kherson, the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea were the most significant locations to watch in order to reduce risk and avoid unnecessary boots on the ground.
Ursa’s suite of capabilities is particularly well suited for this task. Through our proprietary vessel detection algorithms utilizing SAR imagery, we fuse these detections with additional multi-modality data sources collected from partners in our virtual constellation to identify activity.
The result is detection and alerting systems which were directly harnessed by the Armed Forces of Ukraine to support their defense efforts.
Additionally, we partnered with the AWS Aerospace division and a team of industry partners in the ARGUS consortium. The result is a tool that combines satellite imagery, space data, and all-source data to predict future events like Russia’s ASAT missile launch. Hear the conversation from AWS re:Invent in its entirety.
We later investigated Russia’s use of “dark ships” in the transport and sale of grain stolen from Ukraine.
Impactful Moments
When Hurricane Ian struck Florida, we created a free, open-access dashboard for emergency responders. For utility operators, we provided data points overlaid on a map which show down power lines in need of immediate attention.
The role that satellite data analytics can play in preventing conflict was illustrated in this video produced by our friends at SSPI, based on the work we’ve done monitoring a controversial dam in Ethiopia.
With high inflation a concern almost everywhere in the world, we launched a new product, the Oil Inventory Index, designed to help forecast oil prices.
Another major economic story is China’s economic growth, a topic we tackled by examining the country’s property market crisis.
A similar analysis was applied to the FIFA 2022 World Cup, which saw massive infrastructure changes during the run-up to the event held in Qatar.
Also in the sports world, we tracked Monaco over a few week period as the principality transforms itself to host the annual Formula 1 Grand Prix.
