Satellite imaging and intelligence startup Bird.i announces $2.6 million investment led by Accelerated Digital Ventures

The funding, led by Accelerated Digital Ventures (ADV), also comes from new investor, Concrete VC, as well as previous backers Frontline Ventures, Satellite Application Catapult Services and Scottish Investment Bank - the investment arm of Scottish Enterprise. This most recent round brings the startup’s total funding to $3.3 million and will enable it to scale its product portfolio and continue to expand globally.

Bird.i provides both cutting-edge imaging and intelligence services to give businesses a real-time view of the changing world. The high quality and frequency of Bird.i’s images mean they are even more accurate than the likes of Google Maps, providing clients with the insight to efficiently monitor changes and trends on the ground, which helps them solve problems, make strategic decisions and gain competitive advantage. By applying proprietary artificial intelligence and computer vision techniques - such as unsupervised learning and similarity search - to its unique imagery and data, Bird.i extracts insights faster, more accurately and at a much greater scale than the human eye, in order to answer a range of business needs and questions.

Customers who currently use Bird.i include business intelligence and investment firms, infrastructure operators, urban planners and facility managers. The company’s client base includes Thomson Reuters, an early adopter of Bird.i technology, which has integrated the service into its construction intelligence platform in order to track building projects in detail across cities, large regions and continents. Further examples of how Bird.i’s technology can be used by the financial services sector include measuring the crude oil storage at the tank, refinery or country level in real-time; as well as monitoring the transportation of commodities, such as grain, in order to build a detailed picture of supply and demand.

Bird.i founder Corentin Guillo, a French entrepreneur with a background in Earth observation, satellite development and innovation, said: “Bird.i’s ethos is that the important information found in images taken from space and our skies should be made more accessible, affordable and useable for all, to help businesses and individuals see a more accurate picture of our ever-changing world. This additional investment will enable us to continue developing our technology, grow the company and expand our product portfolio. As well as building on our existing offering, we believe there is huge potential for Bird.i to make an impact in additional industries, such as travel and tourism, and expand to mass market consumer services in the near future.”

Michael Dimelow, Head of Investment at ADV, comments: “With Bird.i’s machine learning-powered image processing, a clear and refined view of the world is now accessible to businesses globally, and in a resolution never before achieved outside of military applications. Companies can now make real-time decisions about the progress of major construction and infrastructure projects, or the whereabouts of globally distributed assets such as fleets of vessels, or quantify barrels of oil reserves. We’re excited by the traction Bird.i is building, initially in the construction and financial services markets. The potential for the technology goes way beyond these areas, adding value in any sector where businesses need to track and understand static or dynamic assets.”