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Pixxel closes $7.3M seed round and unveils commercial hyperspectral imaging product
LA and Bangalore-based space startup Pixxel has closed a $7.3 million seed round, including newly committed capital from Techstars, Omnivore VC and more. The company has also announced a new product focus: hyperspectral imaging. It aims to provide that imaging at the highest resolution commercially available, via a small satellite constellation that will provide 24-hour global coverage once it’s fully operational.
Pixxel’s funding today is an extension of the $5 million it announced it had raised back in August of last year. At the time, the startup had only revealed that it was focusing on Earth imaging, and it’s unveiling its specific pursuit of hyperspectral imaging for the first time today. Hyperspectral imaging uses far more light frequencies than the much more commonly used multispectral imaging used in satellite observation today, allowing for unprecedented insight and detection of previously invisible issues, including migration of pest insect populations in agriculture, or observing gas leaks and other ecological threats.
Standard multispectral imaging (left) vs. hyperspectral imaging (right). Image Credits: EPFL
“We started with analyzing existing satellite images, and what we could do with this immediately,” explained Pixxel co-founder and CEO Awais Ahmed in an interview. “We realized that in most cases, it was not able to even see certain problems or issues that we wanted to solve — for example, we wanted to be able to look at air pollution and water pollution levels. But to be able to do that there were no commercial satellites that would enable us to do that, or even open source satellite data at the resolution that would enable us to do that.”
The potential of hyperspectral imaging on Earth, across a range of sectors, is huge, according to Ahmed, but Pixxel’s long-term vision is all about empowering a future commercial space sector to make the most of in-space resources.
“We started looking at space as a sector for us to be able to work in, and we realized that what we wanted to do was to be able to enable people to take resources from space to use in space,” Ahmed said. That included asteroid mining, for example, and when we investigated that, we found hyperspectral imaging was the imaging tech that would enable us to map these asteroids as to whether they contain these metals or these minerals. So that knowledge sort of transferred to this more short-term problem that we were looking at solving.”
Part of the reason that Pixxel’s founders couldn’t find existing available hyperspectral imaging at the resolutions they needed was that as a technology, it has previously been restricted to internal governmental use through regulation. The U.S. recently opened up the ability for commercial entities to pursue very high-resolution hyperspectral imaging for use on the private market, effectively because they realized that these technical capabilities were becoming available in other international markets anyway. Ahmed told me that the main blocker was still technical, however.
Image Credits: Pixxel
“If we were to build a camera like this even two or three years ago, it would not have been possible because of the miniaturized sensors, the optics, etc.,” he said. “The advances that have happened only happened very recently, so it’s also the fact that this the right time to take it from the scientific domain to the commercial domain.”
Pixxel now aims to have its first hyperspectral imaging satellite launched and operating on orbit within the next few months, and it will then continue to launch additional satellites after that once it’s able to test and evaluate the performance of its first spacecraft in an actual operating environment.
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Space startup Wyvern wants to make data about Earth’s health much more accessible
The private space industry is seeing a revolution driven by cube satellites, which are affordable, lightweight satellites that are much easier than traditional satellites to design, build and launch. It’s paving the way for new businesses like Wyvern, an Alberta-based startup that provides a very specific service that wouldn’t even have been possible to offer a decade ago: Relatively low-cost access to hyperspectral imaging taken from low-Earth orbit, which is a method for capturing image data of Earth across many more bands than we’re able to see with our eyes or traditional optics.
Wyvern’s founding team, including CEO Chris Robson, CTO Kristen Cote, CSO Callie Lissinna and VP of Engineering/COO Kurtis Broda, had experience building satellites through their schooling, including working on building the first-ever satellite in space designed and built in Alberta, Ex-Alta 1. They’ve also developed their own proprietary optical technology to develop the kind of imagery that will best serve the needs of the clients they’re pursuing. Their first target market, for instance, are farmers, who will be able to log into the commercial version of their product and get up-to-date hyperspectral imaging data of their fields, which can help them optimize yield, detect changes in soil makeup (which will tell them if they have too little nitrogen) or even help them spot invasive plants and insects.
“We’re doing all sorts of things that directly affect the bottom line of farmers,” explained Robson in an interview. “If you can detect them, and you can quantify them, and the farmers can make decisions on how to act and ultimately how to increase the bottom line. A lot of those things you can’t do with multi-spectral [imaging] right now, for example, you can’t speciate with multi-spectral, so you can’t detect invasive species.”
Multi-spectral imaging, in contrast to hyperspectral imaging, measures light on average in between three to 15 bands, while hyperspectral can manage as many as hundreds of adjoining or neighboring bands, which is why it can do more specialist things like identifying the species of animals on the ground in an observed area from a satellite’s perspective.
Hyperspectral imaging is already a proven technology in use around the world for exactly these purposes, but the main way it’s captured is via drone airplanes, which Robson says is much more costly and less efficient than using CubeSats in orbit.
“Drone airplanes are really expensive, and with us, we’re able to provide it for 10 times less than a lot of these drones currently in use,” he said.
Wyvern’s business model will focus on owning and operating the satellites; providing access to the data, it caters to customers in a way that’s easy for anyone to access and use.
“Our key differentiator is the fact that we allow access to actual actionable information,” Robson said. “Which means that if you want to order imagery, you do it through a web browser, instead of calling somebody up and waiting one to three days to get a price on it, and to find out whether they could even do what you’re asking.”
Robson says that it’s only even become possible and affordable to do this because of advances in optics (“Our optical system allows us to basically put what should be a big satellite into the form factor of a small one without breaking the laws of physics,” Robson told me), small satellites, data storage and monitoring stations, and privatized launches making space accessible through hitching a ride on a launch alongside other clients.
Wyvern will also occupy its own, underserved niche providing this highly specialized info, first to agricultural clients, and then expanding to five other verticals, including forestry, water quality monitoring, environmental monitoring and defense. This isn’t something other more generalist satellite imaging providers like Planet Labs will likely be interested in pursuing, Robson said, because it’s an entirely different kind of business with entirely different equipment, clientele and needs. Eventually, Wyvern hopes to be able to open more broadly access to the data it’s gathering.
“You have the right to access [information regarding] the health of the Earth regardless of who you are, what government you’re under, what country you’re a part of or where you are in the world,” he said. “You have the right to see how other humans are treating the Earth, and to see how you’re treating the Earth and how your country is behaving. But you also have the right to take care of the Earth, because we’re super predators. We’re the most intelligent species. We are; we have the responsibility of being stewards of the Earth. And part of that, though, is being able to add almost omniscience of what’s going on in the Earth in the same way that we understand what’s going on in our bodies. That’s what we want for people.”
Right now, Wyvern is very early on the trajectory of making this happen — they’re working on their first round of funding, and have been speaking to potential customers and getting their initial product validation work finalized. But with actual experience building and launching satellites, and a demonstrated appetite for what they want to build, it seems like they’re off to a promising start.
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IBM’s Verifier inspects (and verifies) diamonds, pills and materials at the micron level
It’s not enough in this day and age that we have to deal with fake news, we also have to deal with fake prescription drugs, fake luxury goods, and fake Renaissance-era paintings. Sometimes all at once! IBM’s Verifier is a gadget and platform made (naturally) to instantly verify that something is what it claims to be, by inspecting it at a microscopic level.
Essentially you stick a little thing on your phone’s camera, open the app, and put the sensor against what you’re trying to verify, be it a generic antidepressant or an ore sample. By combining microscopy, spectroscopy, and a little bit of AI, the Verifier compares what it sees to a known version of the item and tells you whether they’re the same.
The key component in this process is an “optical element” that sits in front of the camera (it can be anything that takes a decent image) amounting to a specialized hyper-macro lens. It allows the camera to detect features as small as a micron — for comparison, a human hair is usually a few dozen microns wide.
At the micron level there are patterns and optical characteristics that aren’t visible to the human eye, like precisely which wavelengths of light it reflects. The quality of a weave, the number of flaws in a gem, the mixture of metals in an alloy… all stuff you or I would miss, but a machine learning system trained on such examples will pick out instantly.
For instance a counterfeit pill, although orange and smooth and imprinted just like a real one if one were to just look at it, will likely appear totally different at the micro level: textures and structures with a very distinct pattern, or at least distinct from the real thing — not to mention a spectral signature that’s probably way different. There’s also no reason it can’t be used on things like expensive wines or oils, contaminated water, currency, and plenty of other items.
IBM was eager to highlight the AI element, which is trained on the various patterns and differentiates between them, though as far as I can tell it’s a pretty straightforward classification task. I’m more impressed by the lens they put together that can resolve at a micron level with so little distortion and not exclude or distort the colors too much. It even works on multiple phones — you don’t have to have this or that model.
The first application IBM is announcing for its Verifier is as a part of the diamond trade, which is of course known for fetishizing the stones and their uniqueness, and also establishing elaborate supply trains to ensure product is carefully controlled. The Verifier will be used as an aide for grading stones, not on its own but as a tool for human checkers; it’s a partnership with the Gemological Institute of America, which will test integrating the tool into its own workflow.
By imaging the stone from several angles, the individual identity of the diamond can be recorded and tracked as well, so that its provenance and trail through the industry can be tracked over the years. Here IBM imagines blockchain will be useful, which is possible but not exactly a given.
It’ll be a while before you can have one of your own, but here’s hoping this type of tech becomes popular enough that you can check the quality or makeup of something at least without having to visit some lab.
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