Pixxel to build world's highest resolution hyperspectral satellite array
Pixxel, India’s first private earth imaging company, said it has
closed its $7.3 million seed round with new capital from Omnivore and Techstars
joining alongside previous investors Lightspeed Ventures, Blume Ventures, growX
and Ryan Johnson, ex-President at Planet Labs.
Also, for the first time on Thursday, Pixxel lifted the
veil of secrecy and publicly discussed its mission to build the world’s highest
resolution hyperspectral satellite constellation. The company’s first
hyperspectral satellite will launch within the next few months.
“We are very excited to finally speak about what we are building
at Pixxel. Our new
funding enables us to build a health monitor for the planet through the world’s
most advanced hyperspectral small-satellites. This enables us to capture some
of the richest imagery that’s ever been beamed down to earth,” said Awais
Ahmed, CEO, Pixxel. “Our
hyperspectral satellites will allow society to tackle many of humanity’s most
pressing issues and we believe they will become the holy grail of remote
sensing - providing the best combination of spatial, temporal and spectral
resolutions to date and empowering humans to see the earth like never before,”
he said.
Compared to the common multispectral satellites prevalent today,
Pixxel’s hyperspectral earth-imaging satellites will beam down 50x more
information by capturing light reflected from the earth in far more detail and
in much narrower bands than just red, green and blue. This allows Pixxel to
capture exact chemical signatures and offer much more accurate solutions to
seemingly unsolvable issues in agriculture, energy and environment
conservation. Once deployed, Pixxel’s constellation will provide 24-hour global
coverage in higher quality resolution and lower cost than any existing
satellite competitors.
The additional funding will be utilised to boost Pixxel’s efforts
in making the agricultural industry more efficient in the country and
worldwide. The satellite imagery with agricultural datasets can help in
improving the existing crop and water management analytics as well as
identifying a spectrum of issues that crop up during the growing season. The
funding will also enable Pixxel to continue to rapidly scale its operations to
meet the growing demand for high-quality remote sensing data through
hyperspectral imaging.
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