Investment

Steve Jurvetson, CEO of Future Ventures and SpaceX board member, reports over 300 venture capital firms making their first investments in space technology in the last 3 years. 

And, according to Matthew Slovik, Head of Global Sustainable Finance at Morgan Stanley, “Remote sensing via satellites, particularly on a daily basis, could reduce delays in the collection and analysis of key sustainability data points that financial markets increasingly rely on.” Satellite imagery is a highly desirable source of information for fund managers seeking to gain an advantage over their competitors. Orbita and SpaceKnow are two of the companies monitoring industrial activity in China and Africa, equipping hedge funds and government agencies with data necessary to make critical economic decisions in the United States. For example, satellite imagery is capable of displaying the intensity of night-time light in China and Africa, which serves as a correlation to economic activity. The combination of street maps, spectral data, and satellite imagery powers SpaceKnow’s estimation of activity at over 6,000 industrial sites. 

Satellite monitoring is only the beginning. New-era companies have only begun to capitalize on the breadth and depth of opportunities in orbital manufacturing, zero G bioprinting (including human heart cells), and ubiquitous global broadband internet service. Space matters to human infrastructure. 

References:

1. Crunchbase: Star-Gazing Investors Launch More Money Into Space Tech

2. International Banker: How satellite imagery is helping hedge funds outperform

3. MDPI: Nightlight as a Proxy of Economic Indicators: Fine-Grained GDP Inference around Chinese Mainland via Attention-Augmented CNN from Daytime Satellite Imagery

4. Orbital Composites

5. PR Newswire: Success: 3D Bioprinter in Space Prints With Human Heart Cells

6. Starlink