Descartes Labs Raises USD 20 Million in Series B-2 Funding Round

Aerospace and Defense Review | Tuesday, October 15, 2019

Descartes Labs has partnered with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency for the Geospatial Cloud Analytics program, intended to assist environmental authorities to identify fracking sites and monitoring illegal fishing activities.

FREMONT, CA: Santa Fe-based geospatial intelligence technology startup, Descartes Labs, raised USD 20 million in a Series B-2 funding round led by Union Grove Venture Partners, with participation from Crosslink Capital and previous round leaders March Capital Partners. The additional funds will be used towards the firm’s efforts to leverage petascale data, satellites, and sensors to develop and update a digital model of Earth supported by a searchable interface.

Currently, the company is working on data refinery efforts for applications such as wildfire detection and satellite imagery analysis, which will support agriculture in North Africa and the Middle East and provide data for food security purposes. Descartes Labs has also partnered with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency for the Geospatial Cloud Analytics program, intended to assist environmental authorities to identify fracking sites and monitoring illegal fishing activities.

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In addition to the funding round, Descartes Labs named Phil Fraher, its new CFO, and Veery Maxwell as Director for Energy Innovation and Patrick Cairns, who co-founded UGVP, as new board observers. Now valued at USD 220 million, the company's raised capital total increased to USD 60 million. Descartes Labs has worked on projects to detect levels of methane gas in oil fields, the spread of wildfires, and how crops might grow in a particular area, and the impact of weather patterns on it all. It has produced work for a range of clients that have included governments, energy giants and industrial agribusiness, and traders.

"The idea is to help them take advantage of all the new data going online. We have a deep belief that we can help them become more efficient. Those looking at earth data are doing so because they care about the planet and are working to try to become more sustainable. So far, there haven’t been any instances where the startup has been prohibited to work with any customers or countries, but you could imagine how in this day of data being the new oil and the fulcrum of power, that could potentially be an issue," said CEO and founder Mark Johnson.

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