WASHINGTON– Hydrosat, a company creating an infrared satellite constellation, announced that it raised a $5 million seed round led by Cultivation Capital, bringing its total raised to date to over $10 million. The round was led by Cultivation Capital with participation by Freeflow Ventures, the Yield Lab, Expon Capital, Techstars, Industrious Ventures, and Synovia Capital.
Hydrosat is flying a multi-spectral and thermal infrared mission with Loft Orbital on a SpaceX Falcon 9 in 2022. The company plans to launch an additional 16-satellite constellation with the capacity to scan the entire globe on a daily basis, generating science quality infrared data and an analytics-ready land surface temperature product.
With the new investment, Hydrosat is adding three space industry heavyweights to the company’s board, Lori Garver, Andy Dearing, and Ryan Johnson. Lori Garver is the CEO of Earthrise Alliance, the former Deputy Administrator of NASA, and a former board member of Maxar Technologies (NYSE: MAXR). Andy Dearing of Cultivation Capital was the CEO of government analytics provider Boundless Spatial. Ryan Johnson was the CEO of RapidEye, the Berlin-based agriculture satellite constellation he sold to Planet in 2015.
“This investment will allow us to further our mission of addressing food security, water scarcity, and climate risk by unlocking the power of thermal infrared data from space,” said Hydrosat CEO Pieter Fossel. “This investment allows us to build off of our existing government business to bring a commercial product to users in agriculture and analytics.”
Hydrosat has contracts with the European Space Agency, US Air Force, and Department of Defense.
While other commercial satellites rely on tasking to be able to image small areas for customers with reservations, Hydrosat is building a high-capacity satellite system to collect data continuously over wide areas. “It’s on-demand data with no reservations,” says Pieter Fossel. “We are building a commercial capability that will make the entire globe available daily from our library, which is powerful for machine learning users.”
“Water stress is one of the most widespread and pressing challenges with climate change, and we believe that Hydrosat is uniquely positioned to address this,” said Andy Dearing, “Hydrosat has assembled a great team to make this happen, and we are excited to lead the investment.”
“Hydrosat is positioned to do for Earth sciences what SpaceX did for launch,” said Lori Garver, “which is to offer a high-quality, commercial capacity for government and commercial users.”
