Area served Worldwide Website spire.com Number of locations 3 (2015) | Number of employees 50-100 Founded 2012 Type of business Private | |
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Founder Peter Platzer, Joel Spark, Jeroen Cappaert Key people Peter Platzer (CEO)
Russell Muzzolini (CTO) Headquarters San Francisco, California, United States | ||
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Spire Global, Inc. is an American private company specializing in data gathered from a network of small satellites. It has successfully deployed twelve Earth observation CubeSats into Low Earth orbit. The company has offices in San Francisco, Glasgow, Singapore, and Boulder.
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History
Spire was founded in 2012 and opened offices in San Francisco. The company later opened offices in Glasgow, Singapore, and Boulder. The company was founded to create ArduSat, a crowd-funded satellite, which was launched on August 3, 2013. Crowd funding in the amount of $106,330 was raised via Kickstarter. The startup was incubated at Lemnos Labs and investments totaling $1.5M were made in a seed round by Shasta Ventures, Emerge, Beamonte Investments, Grishin Robotics, and Lemnos Labs. On July 29, 2014, Spire announced an additional $25M Series A funding round led by RRE Ventures and backed by Emerge, Mitsui & Co. Global Investment, Qihoo, 360 Technology, and Moose Capital. On June 30, 2015, the company announced a $40 Million Series B led by Promus Ventures with participation from Bessemer Venture Partners and Jump Capital.
The company’s first three ArduSat satellites were named after a portmanteau of Arduino, the technology on which they were based, and Satellite. In August 2014, it was announced that Ardusat was spun out of Spire and would focus on educational technology.
In September 2015, Spire became the first CubeSat operator based in the US to launch from India. In January 2016, the company announced a Boulder, Colorado office and that it had hired the former program manager of the COSMIC weather satellite constellation.
Satellites
Spire satellites are built to conform to the CubeSat standard. The company uses minimally adapted consumer electronics to reduce cost. The satellites are placed in Low-Earth Orbit and are scheduled to be retired and replaced every two years. The Lemur-1 satellite was launched as a prototype for a constellation of 125 satellites.
The satellites are multi-sensor. Data types such as Automatic Identification System (AIS) service are used for tracking ships, and weather payloads measure temperature, pressure and precipitation. AIS data is meant for use in illegal fishing, trade monitoring, maritime domain awareness, insurance, asset tracking, search and rescue, and piracy.