WASHINGTON — Urban Sky, a startup offering high-resolution imaging from small stratospheric balloons, has raised $9.75 million in a Series A round.
The Denver-based company announced the funding round Oct. 16, led by Latest Legacy Ventures, Lerer Hippeau and Lavrock Ventures. Several other funds participated within the round, which the corporate said was oversubscribed.
Urban Sky, which raised $4.1 million in a seed round in August 2021, plans to make use of the funding to expand its imagery services. The corporate collects visible and long-wave infrared images using small balloons called “microballoons” by the corporate that operate within the stratosphere.
The funding will help the corporate move into markets outside of Colorado, where it operates today. “The first use of funding is to construct what’s going to effectively be a really refreshed, very high-resolution picture of some major metro areas in america,” Andrew Antonio, chief executive of Urban Sky, said in an interview.
Urban Sky continues to be determining where it is going to expand its imagery services, he said, but will likely be focused on the central and western United States based on demand. The corporate currently flies one balloon every week but expects to extend that cadence to at least one every two to a few days.
Urban Sky currently offers color imagery at a resolution of 10 centimeters, but Antonio said the corporate will use the funding to develop cameras capable of higher resolution in addition to latest infrared cameras, all while fitting into the constraints of the microballoon system that limits payload mass to 2.7 kilograms.
The corporate has seen strong demand from different markets for its color imagery, including environmental monitoring, property insurance and the oil and gas industry, and expects to see interest from others because it expands it services. “We wish to construct this really strong catalog of very high resolution, very regularly updated imagery over major cities. That might help latest applications come to light where people can query that data,” he said.
He argued that Urban Sky’s imagery doesn’t compete directly with those from business satellites. “There are not any satellites that capture imagery at our resolution, and the markets we serve require the resolution that we provide,” he said, noting the corporate has few customers who’re using Urban Sky’s imagery to switch satellite imagery.
That would change, though, as the corporate expands. “In areas where we do operate, we are able to provide a greater product at a greater price that loads of satellite operators,” he said. “Over time, possibly we’ll see more business come to us which might be already using major satellite imagery providers.”
Considered one of Urban Sky’s customers is Skywatch, which resells imagery from nearly 20 firms that operate satellites and aerial platforms. “SkyWatch is witnessing an unprecedented surge in demand for very high resolution Earth remark data,” said James Slifierz, chief executive of Skywatch, in a press release. “Nonetheless, satellite-based supply constraints have significantly curtailed our ability to satisfy this growing appetite,” a spot he said Urban Sky might help fill.
Antonio said the corporate is exploring other uses of its microballoons, citing for instance testing of a mesh network communications system. “We view it in loads of ways as a payload agnostic system,” he said of those microballoons, although the first focus stays using them for imagery.
There’s also interest within the microballoon platform from the Defense Department, which has awarded the corporate several Small Business Innovation Research and Small Business Technology Transfer contracts. A few of that interest, he said, got here after the Chinese “spy balloon” that floated across america early this 12 months.
Urban Sky’s microballoons, he noted, are far smaller than the Chinese balloon. “We’ve very different in technology, but it surely’s made the business easier to speak to individuals who aren’t conversant in ballooning.”