IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Magazine - March 2019 - 61

private, nonsubsidiary company using its satellite constellation or other EO instruments to solve the problem of
remote sensing of Earth's surface in the optical part of
the electromagnetic spectrum. Also, we included startups that, at the same time, are in the active phase of their
growth-attracting venture investments and announcing
plans for the future, as of 31 December 2016.
First, we identified a list of 15 companies fitting the two
requirements and 28 instruments that they use. Then we
excluded four instruments and three companies that employed a nonoptical range of the electromagnetic spectrum
for obtaining data. We also excluded two subsidiary companies because of an inability to distinguish their funding
from the total funding of the holding non-EO company.
Because of scarce information on funding rounds, one
more company was excluded as well. Thus, we ended up
with a sample of nine companies, with 18 space missions
and 21 instruments for further analysis. We took 31  December 2016 as a cutoff date for data collection, so the conditions of the chosen companies are indicated as of this
date, and later changes were not considered (Table 1). The
analysis of data after this cutoff date will be the subject of
future work.
In the second stage, we created a list of the main technical
and product data and collected their technical specifications. For this, we used web portals aggregating information on remote-sensing space missions (e.g., Satellite

Missions Directory [8] and World Meteorological Organization Oscar [9]), official websites (e.g., Planet.com [10]
and Axelspace.com [11]), and brochures (e.g., Astro Digital Landmapper Constellation [12] and Planet Labs Specifications: Spacecraft Operations and Ground Systems
[13]) as well as data supplied by company representatives.
We classified all technical specifications collected into
two groups: the first relates to specifications associated
with the EO instruments carried onboard the satellite
platforms, while the second relates to constellation-level
and satellite-level technical properties. We describe these
features in Table 2 and list their abbreviations as used
in the study and the number of found values relative to
the total number of instruments or missions. It is worth
noting that, for objective reasons, it was not possible to
create a complete list of technical specifications for all
missions: some of them are trade secrets, and some were
not fully defined because the satellites were at the design
stage (Table 2). Thus, the number of values for some of the
variables presented in Table 2 is (slightly) smaller than the
number of instruments or missions. This is reflected in
the column titled "Number of Collected Values."
We collected information on the main rounds of VC investment, again relying on freely available databases,
such as CrunchBase [14] and PitchBook [15]. Using the
analytical reports from PitchBook, we developed avera ged indicators of shares for various fund attraction rounds,

TaBLE 1. a LIST OF EO STarT-UPS, mISSIONS, aND INSTrUmENTS USED FOr ThE rESEarch SamPLE.
STarT-UP
NUmBEr

STarT-UP NamE

mISSION NamE

INSTrUmENT NamE

WavELENGTh
raNGE (nm)

INSTrUmENT
NUmBEr

1

Terra Bella
(Skybox Imaging)

SkySat

SkySat

450-900

1

2

Planet Labs inc.

3

Urthecast

Dove, Flock

Planet scope

455-860

2

RapidEye

reis

440-850

3

Deimos-1

sLim6

520-900

4

Deimos-2

Hirais

420-890

5

ISS

theia

470-880

6

ISS

iris

n/a

7

OptiSAR

dual-mode optical camera

n/a

8

4

astro digital

Landmapper-HD

n/a

450-900

9

Landmapper-BC

n/a

520-900

10

5

satellogic

ÑuSat

mult+Pan

400-900

11

Hyperspectral

400-900

12

6

omniearth

7

axelspace

OmniEarth

thermal ir

8,000-14,000

13

n/a

n/a

14

Hodoyoshi 1

n/a

450-890

15

GRUS 1,2,3

n/a

450-900

16

WNISAT 1R

n/a

450-1,005

17

WNISAT 1

n/a

440-1,000

18

8

Hera systems

2HOPSat, 1HOPSat

n/a

n/a

19

9

GHGsat canada

GHGSat-D (Claire)

2d wide-angle Fabry-Perot
imaging spectrometer

1,600-1,700

20

clouds and aerosols sensor

400-1,000

21

n/a: not available; Pan: panchromatic.

march 2019

ieee Geoscience and remote sensing magazine

61
http://www.Planet.com http://www.Axelspace.com
IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Magazine - March 2019

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