The LSE Directory / Alternative data
Ursa Space Systems is a satellite intelligence company headquartered in Ithaca, New York, founded in 2014. It fuses synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery with data from more than 70 other commercial satellites and sources, including electro-optical, RF, AIS, and ADS-B feeds, to detect physical change on the ground regardless of cloud cover, smoke, or time of day. Its offerings fall into two lines: pre-built data subscriptions delivered on a recurring schedule, and custom monitoring built around a customer's own sites and cadence, both drawing on more than a decade of SAR archive imagery for trend and change analysis. Within the geospatial alternative-data category, Ursa specializes in tank-level crude oil storage measurement. Its Global Oil Storage product measures inventories in close to 10,000 storage tanks worldwide, covering more than 3.6 billion barrels of capacity, on a weekly cadence, deriving fill levels from the shadow geometry visible in radar imagery. Because SAR penetrates cloud cover and works at night, Ursa can image storage sites that optical-only competitors periodically miss, an advantage it has extended into an iron ore stockpile tracker and an Auto Manufacturing Index. Its customer base spans two distinct markets: commodity trading desks, macro and quantitative hedge funds, banks, and oil companies on the commercial side, and US government and defense agencies on the government side, a split that is less common among pure financial alternative-data vendors. The company was founded in 2014 by CEO Adam Maher, COO Julie Baker, and Chief Strategy Officer Derek Edinger. It raised a 15 million dollar Series B round in 2020 and the first close of a 16 million dollar Series C round in March 2022, led by Dorilton Ventures with Razor's Edge Ventures, RRE Ventures, and Paladin Capital Group participating. On the government side, Ursa was one of 13 vendors the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency selected in January 2025 for the Luno B commercial-data IDIQ contract vehicle, a five-year base ordering period with a 200 million dollar ceiling shared across all awardees; in July 2025 it received a 21 million dollar TrueSight delivery order under that vehicle for change detection and domain-awareness alerting. It also supports the US Space Force, delivering Operational Planning Products jointly with Aireon, and was named among the awardees on the Missile Defense Agency's SHIELD multi-award IDIQ in December 2025, a vehicle with a very large shared ceiling across its many contractors rather than a sum unique to Ursa. S&P Global Platts incorporates Ursa's oil storage measurements into its Platts Analytics products. In August 2025, Sumitomo Corporation, through its US subsidiary Sumitomo Corporation of Americas, made a strategic investment in Ursa Space and signed an exclusive agreement to represent Ursa's platform in the Japanese market, the company's first publicly announced push into Asia; deal terms were not disclosed. Ursa also expanded its consumer-facing partnership with SkyFi in March 2025, adding iron ore stockpile monitoring alongside the crude oil inventory product the two companies launched together in 2024.
