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Ibadan, 8 May 2024. – Privateer CEO Alex Fielding has announced the Company’s successful $56.5 million series A raise and consequent acquisition of analytics firm Orbital Insight. As a result, Privateer will include mapping and intelligence services as part of its space data offerings, adding Orbital Insight as a wholly-owned subsidiary. Aero X Ventures led the funding round, with participation from other investors, including Lux Capital, BOKA Group, Starburst Ventures, and the Winklevoss twins.
For more than a decade, Orbital Insight has worked to make critical information about happenings on land, air, and sea accessible and readily usable for mass market applications. Its AI modeling has helped across various industries to provide unprecedented levels of insight into areas including illegal fishing and supply chain management. The Company’s TerraScope Earth observation platform is a search engine that deploys quickly, integrates with proprietary and publicly available data sources, and enables rapid, scalable processing. As a result of the merger, the analytics platform will integrate with Privateer’s Wayfinder data engine, bringing together data and intelligence across all domains, from sea to space
Orbital Insight Cofounder James Crawford explained that by merging Companies like Privateer and Orbital Insights that focus on space and the Earth “together to understand what’s in space and what’s going on on Earth, you can build an end-to-end solution for customers to understand both.”
Alex Fielding also explained in an interview with Reuters that the acquisition would expand Privateer’s offerings as revenue prospects in the space situational awareness (SSA) market were limited. Speaking about the SSA Market, the CEO said, “It’s not really a market; it’s actually a bunch of companies that have been providing a stopgap for the fact that the Government hasn’t provided a service for space traffic management.”
