Earth observation is the main area of investment among space-related VCs right now, writes Valery Komissarov, a VC at the Skolkovo Foundation, in an article for VentureBeat.com.
A chart showing investment in earth observation startups and other investment in spacetech.
VCs are getting serious about space-related startups, and there are some truly exponential growth opportunities in the SpaceTech ecosystem.
But the majority of money that went into SpaceTech last year was in just two deals — a $1 billion fundraise for SpaceX and a $500 million raise for OneWeb. If you ignore those as outliers, SpaceTech funding in 2015 was only around $300 million. Not so epic.
The segment of startups seeing the most VC attention is the earth observation (EO) segment. Companies building earth observation (EO) satellite constellations (basically, cameras put into orbit and photographing the Earth on a regular basis) pulled in more than half the SpaceTech funding from 2012 to 2015 and 72% in 2015. Moreover, the only exit in SpaceTech until now – Skybox Imaging (recently renamed Terra Bella), which Google acquired in 2014 for $500 million – is also an EO company.
All of this makes earth observation the main investment thesis among space-related VCs at the moment.
If we look at 2016, Planetary Resources, a startup developing asteroid mining technology in the long-term but deploying EO satellites with unique capabilities (more on this in a minute) this year, raised a $21 million Series A from OS Fund, Grishin Robotics, Space Angels Network, and Larry Page, among others.
Given the focused VC investments in EO satellite developers and significantly decreased costs to build and launch a satellite, many tech startups are now trying to jump into this space.
Read the full article at VentureBeat.com, where it was first published.