The LSE Directory / Alternative data
Descartes Labs is a Santa Fe, New Mexico based geospatial analytics company that automates the collection, processing and modeling of Earth observation data through its cloud platform, EarthOne. EarthOne ingests and harmonizes large volumes of satellite, aerial, drone, weather, marine AIS and rail data, then applies computer vision and machine learning to turn that raw imagery into structured, queryable analytics. Customers work through hosted Jupyter notebooks and Python APIs, covering catalog, raster, scenes and workflow functions, to build and run their own models on top of the harmonized data rather than handling raw pixels themselves. Its positioning differs from competing satellite imagery vendors in that Descartes Labs sells itself as a data refinery and development platform rather than an imagery reseller: it pulls in dozens of public and commercial Earth observation sources, normalizes their geometry and radiometry, and exposes the harmonized result as a self serve analytics environment, a shift it made deliberately from 2020 onward to reduce reliance on bespoke consulting engagements. Customers span agriculture, energy, mining and insurance, where the platform supports crop yield estimation, resource exploration and asset risk assessment; financial services firms have also used its commodity output as an alternative data input, an application the company demonstrated publicly as early as 2016 with a corn yield estimate released ahead of the USDA's official figure. A wholly owned subsidiary, Descartes Labs Government, adapts the same technology for the US Department of Defense and intelligence community, and has held contracts including a $2.2 million Air Force Research Laboratory award in 2020 for ISR targeting analytics, plus DARPA and NGA linked geospatial cloud analytics work. The company was founded in 2014 as a spinout of computer vision technology developed over roughly seven years at Los Alamos National Laboratory, with Mark Johnson, previously CEO of the news reader app Zite (sold to CNN in 2011 and later to Flipboard), as founding CEO. It raised roughly $58 million across several funding rounds from investors including Crosslink Capital and March Capital, with its largest round, a $30 million Series B, closing in August 2017. By 2021 the company reported more than $17 million in annual revenue, but persistent cash burn, Johnson later described it as burning $2.3 million a month, led to a 2022 recapitalization in which New York private equity firm Antarctica Capital took a controlling interest and installed new leadership. In October 2024, EarthDaily Analytics acquired Descartes Labs, including Descartes Labs Government, and folded its EarthOne software and analytics stack into EarthDaily's business as EarthDaily built out its own multispectral satellite constellation. As of July 2026, EarthDaily had launched eight of the ten satellites planned for that constellation and was targeting the start of commercial operations for late summer 2026, with the Descartes Labs platform continuing to operate as the analytics and software layer serving mining, energy, insurance, agriculture and government customers.
