Enterprise: Esper Satellite Imagery
USP: The enterprise that began in a university hackathon and has visions of monitoring the entire world has won government support to launch its first sensor into orbit in May 2023.
Esper Satellite Imagery started as a project that won the UniHack 2019 innovation competition, persuading Esper founder Shoaib Iqbal to “spin it out” into a company. “We’ve been working on it ever since and have built a number of customer relationships, built proprietary technology and received government support to launch our first satellite sensor into orbit in May 2023,” Shoaib explains.
“Esper is reducing the cost of deploying high-precision sensing hardware in space.”
Esper builds and launches sensors onboard satellites that can image carbon in the atmosphere, identify crop nutrients and even detect mineral deposits on the earth’s surface using spectral imaging. This imagery data is supplied to businesses in climate risk assessment, agriculture and mining. Esper’s primary aim is to make industries reliant on the earth’s resources sustainable. It achieves this by helping them use climate data to increase efficiency.
“We’ve been fortunate to have backers from within our friends and family who initially funded the company,” Shoaib says. “This was then matched by a government grant that doubled what we had raised. These funds are primarily going towards the launch of our first satellite. We’ve since also received another grant from the Seven. Seven. Six. foundation, Alexis Ohanian’s (co-founder of Reddit) philanthropic fund that [supports] young people working on climate initiatives. This funding, in total, has given us around $500,000 that we’ve been building on.”
Further to this, Shoaib and his team have been working with HEX, an ed-tech company. “As founders still in university, we barely had any exposure to the VC [venture capital] and investing world outside of our technical skillsets, and that’s where we’ve had to develop a number of relationships that have helped us raise funds,” he says. “The HEX program helped us meet a number of people in the Australian angel and VC ecosystem, which helped us get investment.”
While the core technology behind Esper has been around for decades through development at NASA and research organisations across the globe, the technical team at Esper is advancing it much further, while reducing the cost of deploying high-precision sensing hardware in space. “We’ve built the actual imaging sensors as well as proprietary data-processing software that allows our sensors to collect high-quality data while being low-cost to build and deploy,” Shoaib enthuses.
A core part of the technology has been developed by Przemyslaw Lorenczak – Esper’s chief technology officer – and the engineering team Przemyslaw leads, which includes software developers Manjitha Wijesinghe and Ullas Bhanu, and hardware engineers April Bray and Rashmidha Kanagarajah.
Building up to its first satellite sensor launch, Esper has signed almost $150 million in pre-orders.
“We’ve signed agreements with a number of agricultural firms, mining exploration firms and firms looking to deliver climate risk and carbon data to decision-makers in government and large private-sector organisations,” Shoaib says. “Beyond this, we’ve also solidified channel partnerships with data delivery and satellite firms, with whom we will be collaborating to launch our sensors into orbits and serve our data to our customers.”
Shoaib’s vision is to monitor the entire physical world, and monitoring the climate is a major pillar of that vision. “We want to see ourselves becoming a premier climate data provider with the sensor infrastructure we’re building, [and] to eventually go beyond just climate data and look at the entirety of our planet and humanity’s role in it,” he avers. “We want to build the largest sensor infrastructure in the world, starting with a network of 18 of our climate sensors we’re looking to launch by 2026.”
This article first appeared in issue 39 of the Inside Small Business quarterly magazine
