The LSE Directory / Alternative data
Orbital Insight is a geospatial analytics company, founded in 2013 and based in Palo Alto, California, that applies computer vision and machine learning to satellite, aerial and drone imagery combined with anonymised mobile-phone geolocation data to measure physical-world economic activity. Its self-serve analytics platform, originally launched as Orbital Insight GO and relaunched in 2022 as TerraScope, lets analysts query indicators such as car counts at retail locations, vessel and vehicle movements, construction progress and crop conditions without processing raw imagery themselves. Its best-known product is the Global Geospatial Crude Index, which estimates crude oil held in storage by measuring the shadows cast by the floating roofs of more than 25,000 external floating-roof tanks across more than 1,000 tank farms in 67 countries. This focus on inferring hard-to-observe physical inventories and movement from imagery and location data, rather than simply licensing raw satellite tasking, is what the company sells as its core product, a derived analytic signal aimed chiefly at hedge funds and other financial-services firms seeking alternative-data trading signals, alongside insurers assessing property and catastrophe risk, and government and defence agencies. The company was founded by James Crawford, who previously worked on AI systems at Bell Labs, Google Books and NASA's Mars rover programs. It raised roughly 130 million dollars in venture funding over its history, including a 20 million dollar Series B in 2016 backed by In-Q-Tel, Google Ventures and CME Ventures alongside existing investors Sequoia Capital, Lux Capital and Bloomberg Beta, and a 50 million dollar Series C in 2017 led by Sequoia Capital. Disclosed customers and partners have included Bloomberg L.P., RBC Capital Markets, S&P Global, the U.S. Air Force and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, and it partnered with Airbus on an Earth Monitor imagery product. Orbital Insight ran into financial difficulty in 2023, and in May 2024 it was acquired by Privateer, the space-situational-awareness company co-founded by Alex Fielding and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, which announced the deal alongside a 56.5 million dollar Series A raise. Privateer is integrating TerraScope's Earth-observation analytics with its own Wayfinder data engine to offer combined sea-to-space intelligence, and the orbitalinsight.com domain now redirects to privateer.com.
