Dozens of established players and new entrants compete to bring the most advanced remote sensing data to customers. These companies may use hyperspectral, thermal, radar, or optical instruments, but none, so far, use light detection and ranging (lidar), a technology that is best known for its use in self-driving cars. nuviewa geospatial technology company that emerged from the underground in the present day, wants to change that.
The company aims to build a constellation of 20 commercial satellites equipped with its proprietary lidar system. The “end game,” as Nuview founder and CEO Clint Graumann put it, is to map the entire land surface of Earth with lidar, annually.
It’s an ambitious plan, but one that could potentially generate huge revenue if the company manages to pull it off.
There are many good reasons why no commercial company has succeeded in implementing space-based lidar at scale. NASA has sent out a handful of science payloads that use lidar, but they are very large systems that require a lot of power. When lidar is used for mapping here on Earth, it is done with non-scalable and expensive platforms like planes and drones. It’s also not as simple as transferring lidar systems from autonomous cars to satellites; early systems are usually short-range, with very low power requirements. Compared to what Nuview is building, they are “apples and oranges,” Graumann said.
But there have been a number of changes in the past five years that make Nuview’s ambitious plan technically feasible. Some parts of the lidar system are finally commercially available after falling under the sole purview of the US Department of Defense, for example. Nuview has also been able to reduce the size and weight of its system compared to others that have gone into space, he said. But in possibly the most significant advance, Graumann said the company’s system will be able to scan large areas at once.
“That’s what really unlocks the huge revenue potential and the potential to do big projects on a national mapping scale,” he said.
The space industry has also changed: the cost of launching has been reduced thanks to innovations from SpaceX and other launch providers. Small commercial satellites are also now capable of generating enough power to run a lidar system, Graumann said, adding that all of the satellite bus manufacturers Nuview is currently in talks with can produce platforms powerful enough for the lidar payload.
“That just wasn’t commercially feasible or even feasible four or five years ago, unless you had a massive system,” he said.
Graumann said the company’s idea “had an impact on him [him] like lightning.” Graumann, an Earth observation (EO) industry veteran who has recently been advising EO companies and startups with his firm TerraMetric, said he repeatedly heard from clients who wanted to merge their dataset with lidar data.
The company has kept a low profile ever since. The Orlando, Florida-based startup closed its first round of funding last year and is about to close a second round. Nuview does not disclose how much capital the company has raised so far, nor its investors, but Florida Funders, MaC Venture Capital, Broom Ventures and Industrious Ventures list Nuview among their investments on their respective websites. The company also won a government contract for an undisclosed amount.
The company will begin by launching a “proof of concept” satellite called “Mr. Spoc,” though they don’t yet have a firm launch site booked. Once they’ve demonstrated their technology, they will attempt to launch the commercial constellation in tranches of five, spacing each launch 18 months until the company reaches a constellation of 20.
Nuview has earned more than $1 billion in “early adoption deals,” revenue that depends on the company meeting specifications. These early adopters will have access to the data that the Mr. Spoc spacecraft collects and will be able to provide feedback on future satellites. To date, the company has a team of 21 full-time and contract employees and is working on building a new facility with optics, integration and laser labs in Orlando.
So far, Graumann expects the company’s biggest market to be national mapping for civil agencies around the world. Nuview has also seen interest from existing space-based sensing customers looking to merge their data with lidar, to essentially make their product even more robust by combining it with lidar data.
“When you look at optical data, like you see in Google Earth, it’s pretty and meant to see things visually. LIDAR data is billions of discrete data points,” Graumann said. “When you think about the world of AI and machine learning, there is nothing more valuable than more data points to train and work on. […] The satellite data that is up there today was made for people. Lidar data is made for machines.”
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