London-based Satellite Vu uses satellite technology is to meet global challenges as it focuses on infrared and head emissions. In a recent development, the company collected £3.6 million in seed funding.
World’s first thermal imaging satellite
The seed funding round was carried out by Seraphim Capital. The round was multiple times oversubscribed and was assisted by A/O PropTech, Europe’s largest Proptech venture capital firm alongside other specialist investors, including Ridgeline Ventures, the Earth Science Foundation, E2MC Ventures and Stellar Solutions.
The investment round will be used for the launch of the world’s first satellite constellation capable of imaging the thermal footprint of any building on the planet every 1-2 hours. Also, it will enable Satellite Vu to come out with the construction of its first satellite that is due to launch in 2022.
Satellite Vu has been assisted by the UK Space Agency through its National Space Innovation Programme (NSIP) to help build of the infrared sensor for its first satellite. Also, the company joined via the SPRINT programme with the world-renowned University of Surrey to evaluate the utility of infrared observations in the maritime domain.
“This ground-breaking and timely technology will, for the first time, allow the government and the public to make better and informed decisions on which buildings are a priority to upgrade.” said Anthony Baker CEO of Satellite Vu. “The lessons learnt from the pandemic were: test, test, test; in the climate change challenge we need to: measure, measure, measure. Satellite Vu’s technology is the best satellite system, by far, to measure the temperature of buildings, globally, consistently and recurrently with multiple revisits per day.”
James Bruegger, the Managing Partner of Seraphim Capital, said “We believe that high resolution infrared satellite data holds enormous promise for positively impacting the world. A combination of poor resolution, high cost and infrequency of data capture has held back the application of this high impact dataset for decades. We’ve backed Satellite Vu because it alone has the technology to address all these issues and make high resolution infrared the next major category of Space data.”
