Ubotica raises $11 million to scale maritime-intelligence platform

Source Domain: spacenews.com

SAN FRANCISCO – Ubotica Technologies, an Irish company focused on artificial intelligence for spacecraft, has raised $11 million to expand commercial sales of its maritime-intelligence platform.

The platform, Live Maritime Intelligence (LMI), unveiled in April is designed to help satellites analyze data and take action in orbit.

For many space operations, tasking is handled by people on the ground, Aubrey Dunne, Ubotica co-founder and chief technology officer, said in May at the SmallSat Europe conference in Amsterdam. “If we can automate this by processing directly on board, we can remove the human-in-the-loop bottleneck, we can remove the ground-in-the-loop bottleneck and build autonomous systems that are capable of generating higher value information and more information.”

Act Venture Capital, Greencode Ventures and Atlantic Bridge provided funding for Ubotica’s latest investment round.

“Nations can’t afford to wait hours for imagery while a vessel goes dark over critical infrastructure,” Andrew O’Neill, Act Venture Capital principal, said in a statement. “Live Maritime Intelligence proves what on-board intelligence is worth: it turns Earth Observation from a camera into a real-time sentinel, starting with Europe’s waters.”

With MLI, satellite constellations will be able to quickly detect threats “anywhere across vast ocean areas, creating both a strategic security capability and a compelling commercial opportunity,” Terhi Vapola, Greencode Ventures managing partner and founder, said in a statement.

Ubotica AI applications have been deployed on more than 30 Earth-observation satellites, according to the news release. Working with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and U.K. startup Open Cosmos, Ubotica showed that a satellite could look ahead along its orbital path and analyze the results before gathering imagery.

“Ubotica has spent years pioneering Orbital AI, and we have applied that knowledge to one of the…

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