This article has been revised from the original version.
Hyperspectral imaging company Pixxel will be using a new $36 million investment to send more satellites into space. Its satellite data provides companies and government agencies with climate and environmental insights. The series B funding round included new investor Google, as well as existing investors Blume Ventures, Lightspeed India Partners, Radical Ventures LLC, GrowX Ventures, Sparta Group and Athera Venture Partners.
Pixxel, which has dual headquarters in El Segundo and Bengaluru, India, was founded in 2019 by Awais Ahmed and Kshitij Khandelwal. The founders now serve as chief executive officer and chief technology officer, respectively. Both were finishing their undergraduate degrees in India and said they noticed that there was a gap in what existing earth-imaging satellite data could detect. Ahmed said that a new type of imaging technology, called hyperspectral imagery, can look at soil nutrient content, identify crop species or pest infestations, and can take images even if there are clouds covering the sky.
“Being able to detect natural gas leaks or underground oil leaks in pipelines is not something most satellites in space can do,” Ahmed said. “Hyperspectral (imagery) can look at hundreds of wavelengths in the visible and infrared domain, which is what makes it unique.”
Pixxel designs and operates its own satellites. So far, the company has launched three, two of which were launched through Hawthorne-based SpaceX. With this new investment, it plans to put six more satellites into space in 2024 and 18 others by the end of 2025.
In addition to providing imagery, Pixxel has software tools to analyze the data for customers, and doesn’t “just dump data down and have customers figure it out.” Ahmed said that the company currently works with a mix of private entities and government agencies.
“Most of our (private) customers come from the agriculture space, wanting to know what’s happening with soil, with their crops and whatnot,” Ahmed said. “Then we have the oil and gas and mining companies, where it’s about monitoring of assets to see if they’re harming the environment. And then finally, we have a lot of climate and environment and forestry related-use cases … for example, forest services for different states.”
Pixxel’s clients include Rio Tinto Group, a multinational metals and mining corporation, and Google. Pixxel announced in March that it had been awarded a five-year contract with the National Reconnaissance Office, an agency of the U.S. Department of Defense, which Ahmed said will help the agency combat issues including food insecurity. The company currently has more than 50 clients.
While agencies like the National Aeronautics and Space Administration also have hyperspectral imaging capabilities on satellites, it’s integral for many global entities to have private companies provide such services. Dr. Essam Heggy is a space scientist who works at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering and the Pasadena-based Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He said that many countries don’t have national space agencies and that companies like Pixxel help make space observations available to a larger portion of the world.
“The value of these companies … is for developing nations who are still working and improving their economy, and they want to have access to this information to improve their resilience to natural hazards to environmental hazards,” Heggy said. “So that’s, I believe, where the achievement is. These companies are able to reach far beyond what space agencies are able to reach because they don’t (only) provide the raw data … they provide a final product which helps policymakers and economists to implement changes.”
Heggy also said that companies in some nations, particularly in developing nations, may not trust the information or data being distributed by their own research entities. He said that seeing a company provide actionable space-observation data to the commercial sector is new to him.
“The benefit of space technology is going to be expanding as our planet’s environmental problems grow and as the population of Earth grows,” Heggy said. “Space agencies will not be able, by themselves, to address all the questions and there will be more reliance on companies like this to provide services for the communities in the U.S. … and for nations that do not have space agencies.”
Pixxel’s satellites are synchronized with the sun and survey the entire globe. Ahmed said that there are certain designated monitoring areas, such as agricultural belts or the Amazon rainforest, where it captures images on a daily basis. Customers generally enter long-term contracts, usually for three or five years, and can request to have specific areas monitored. Customers pay a per-day rate for each square kilometer covered.
In addition to expanding its satellite constellation, Pixxel will use the money to build out its team. It currently has 120 employees and plans to have 200 by the end of the year. Ahmed said that, at some point, it wants to open-source its data to aid academic institutions.
“The impact that we create from these satellites is important to us,” Ahmed said. “We call it the vision of building a health monitor for the planet, being able to look at various health parameters of our planet so as to see how they affect the overall climate environment … we’re just focused on putting these satellites up there and analyzing the data to make the world more sustainable place.”
