Hydrosat secures $20M in grants and investments.
It will measure plant water stress and other climate change indicators with geospatial analytics.
Statkraft Ventures led the funding round. Participants included Blue Bear Capital, Hartree Partners, OTB Ventures, Freeflow Ventures, Cultivation Capital, Techstars, Santa Barbara Venture Partners, Expon Capital and Hemisphere Ventures.
The funding Hydrosat announced April 25 includes $5 million in government grants and $15 million in Series A investment. Hydrosat announced one of the grants, a $1.2 million U.S. Air Force award to investigate national security applications for thermal infrared data, earlier this year.
With the new funding, Hydrosat will build two satellites, expand its staff and, as Pieter Fossel, Hydrosat co-founder and CEO, told SpaceNews by email;
“Bring a new commercial data fusion and analytics product to market.”
Hydrosat’s first two satellite missions are scheduled to launch in early 2024.
Extreme weather events like droughts, wildfires, storms and flooding are becoming increasingly frequent. The United States experienced 18 weather and climate disasters with price tags of $1 billion or more in 2022.
Climate tech
“Having recently expanded our investment scope to include climate tech, we are happy to announce Hydrosat as our first investment in this space, Hydrosat will significantly improve insights and decision-making for those in charge by combining high-resolution thermal imagery with advanced analytics. The company’s technology enables the optimization of irrigation, fertilizer usage, wildfire and drought prediction, water resource management and urban heat mapping capabilities.”
Hydrosat has raised $35 million since the company was founded in 2017.
Click here for original article.
