Awais Ahmed and Kshitij Khandelwal weren’t looking for funding when $24 million dollars fell into their lap.
But it did. The pair founded the space startup Pixxel in 2019 to, as Ahmed described it, “build a health monitor for the planet” that could track climate issues. A recent resurgence around global and national environmental, societal and governance standards put it back on the map for investors. The $24 million extension round, which Pixxel announced in early December, raised its series B to $60 million, adding M&G Catalyst and Glade Brook Capital Partners to its roster of investors. Pixxel has raised $95 million to date.
“When more money comes into a space company where we need to spend money on launching satellites, we generally don’t say no,” Ahmed said. “You never know with a satellite; it might not work. And so having additional capital saves us from that standpoint.”
Pixxel, which began in India and quickly established another headquarters in El Segundo, is one of many space companies in Southern California. Per Pitchbook, 152 space startups received their most recent financing between August and December so far and 26% of those startups are based in Southern California.
“Pixxel’s proprietary technology will be transformational and adaptable to monitor for enhancing crop health, climate change, managing resources more effectively and protecting our environment,” Praveg Patil, the head of the Asia Pacific region of M&G Impact & Private Equity, said in a statement.
Pixxel is currently at work preparing a constellation of 18 hyperspectral satellites that will float through space – and hopes to be the first to do so. While plenty of satellites orbit our planets that can “see” in a couple more wavelengths than the human eye, hyperspectral imagery can see images in anywhere from 150 to 300 wavelengths.
“When you are looking at a farm from space from a normal satellite image or from a normal phone image, you’re able to tell that here are crops and here is the road and here is a building. But you wouldn’t be able to go beyond that to identify what is actually happening within the crop, what is actually happening within the soil,” Ahmed said. “What happens with hyperspectral, since you are now breaking up light into these hundreds of wavelengths, some of those will be able to tell you that the soil nutrients are missing. There is nitrogen missing.”
Space satellites have long been used to monitor climate change and give farmers a birds-eye view on their sprawling patchworks of crops. Using hyperspectral imaging, the agriculture industry could spot crop diseases before trillions of dollars of produce spoil or identify the varied nutritional nature of the soil that will impact sprouting vegetables.
In the energy and mining sectors, hyperspectral images can alert companies to a methane leak (which is invisible to the human eye but produces a bright flare on hyperspectral images) or to the early stages of an oil leak, which will affect soil. It can also identify where certain rare earth metals – like lithium and cobalt, which are in high demand from the electric vehicle industry – are in large supply.
