Russia’s top Earth-monitoring company ScanEx has signed a deal with the Skolkovo Foundation to base a 250 million ruble R&D center at the Innovation Center.
ScanEx, operating since 1989, offers a complete set of services ranging from acquisition to thematic processing of earth-observation images from space. It is an efficient tool for territory management on the basis of the latest and continuously updated information about Earth acquired from satellites.
Becoming a Skolkovo partner will give ScanEx access to the Skolkovo ecosystem and its 1,000-plus residents, many of which are involved in satellite communications and other space-related activities.
“We’ve been cooperating with the Skolkovo Foundation for a long time and we know that lots of young teams are developing their products on the basis of space-based imagining,” said ScanEx general director Valery Barinberg.
“The possibility of regular contact with such teams is incredibly valuable for us, not least because of the strong synergy between our big data processing platforms and the services that these developers offer,” he added.
ScanEx technology at work: Coastal changes in southern Russia from 1994 (left) to 2002 (right). Photo: ScanEx
The ScanEx R&D center will be 1,000 sq. m. of rented office space within the Skolkovo Technopark, and is to open this year at an overall cost of 250 million rubles. ScanEx will base 60 employees at Skolkovo.
The deal was following Monday's Friends of the Space Cluster meeting at the Skolkovo Hypercube.
Skolkovo vice president Alexei Belyakov, the executive director of the space cluster, noted that “working with ScanEx is very important for the Skolkovo space cluster, because ScanEx is one of the few companies in Russia that is successfully commercializing its space activity.”
“We hope that our work with ScanEx will have a strong effect on our ecosystem and for the Foundation as a whole, primarily in the form of mentorship, conducting joint work with other developers and creating infrastructure together,” Belyakov added.
ScanEx builds, maintains and updates networks of receiving ground stations that belong to such Russian governmental agencies as the Emergencies Ministry, the Ministry of Natural Resources as well as regional space monitoring centers under educational and scientific institutions.
Remote sensing centers in Spain, UAE, Vietnam, Iran, Nigeria, Kazakhstan and the United States use ScanEx technology.
ScanEx is the latest in a host of top companies to sign partnership agreement with the Skolkovo Foundation.
Last month, Russia’s largest IT systems integrator Technoserv committed to building an R&D center housing 150 employees on the territory of the innovations hub.
The addition of Technoserv comes a little under a month after Japanese electronics giant Panasonic signed up as a Skolkovo partner.
Skolkovo’s two-dozen world-leading partners also include Boeing, Cisco Systems, EADS, GE, Johnson & Johnson, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Siemens, Nokia and Samsung. Panasonic is Skolkovo’s 45th partner overall.
Partner status allows firms to open up research facilities at Skolkovo and grants access to the Skolkovo ecosystem, giving the company first refusal on innovations produced by Skolkovo’s resident startups and also better access to the Russian market.