Skybox Imaging Raises $70 Million To Take Hadoop To The Final Frontier
Skybox Imaging, a fledgling services startup that’s building a business around applying big data analytics to satellite imagery and video, has raised $70 million in Series C funding from Canaan Partners and Norwest Venture Partners, bringing its overall funding to $91 million. But wait until you hear where the money’s actually going.
Skybox seeks to put no fewer than two high-res imagery microsatellites – SkySat-1 and SkySat-2 – into Earth’s orbit, while also bolstering its team of software engineers and data scientists planetside with new hires. The end-game is to get a full constellation of SkySat satellites into orbit as soon as possible.
Once Skybox has this imagery, it’s going to open the door to all kinds of new insights that the company claims were previously only accessible by governments and militaries. See, most satellite constellations only sporadically take imagery from various regions of the planet, but Skybox’s space-borne systems will take more pictures from more of the surface, more often.
But the reason I’m talking about it at all is how Skybox is leveraging Apache Hadoop in order to derive all kinds of insights from the data the satellites return. Capturing the same stretch of planet multiple times gives a deep, exploitable well of data, which can be processed by Hadoop and analyzed by the aforementioned data scientists. Those insights (as well as the imagery itself, of course) will be made available to the appropriate industries, and Skybox says that what it finds has applications to fields as broad as business intelligence, the financial sector, disaster response and humanitarian relief.
A $91 million investment is a considerable gamble for the VC world – recent estimates from Wikibon analysts placed the pure-play big data market at $311 million in revenue, which tells me that Skybox’s venture capital partners are confident in its business model and ability to directly monetize big data analytics. Of course, it could have something to do with the previously-unavailable high-definition imagery, too.
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