exactEarth Ltd is a Canadian company that specializes in data services that deliver real-time global location-based maritime vessel tracking information utilizing patented satellite AIS detection technology. exactEarth provides satellite AIS data services to commercial markets as well as government customers in

India India, officially the Republic of India (Hindi: ), is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by area, the second-most populous country, and the most populous democracy in the world. Bounded by the Indian Ocean on the so ...

Canada Canada is a country in North America. Its ten provinces and three territories extend from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean and northward into the Arctic Ocean, covering over , making it the world's second-largest country by tot ...

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territori ...

, Australia and across

Europe Europe is a large peninsula conventionally considered a continent in its own right because of its great physical size and the weight of its history and traditions. Europe is also considered a subcontinent of Eurasia and it is located entirel ...

. Founded in 2009, exactEarth is based in

Cambridge, Ontario Cambridge is a city in the Regional Municipality of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, located at the confluence of the Grand and Speed rivers. The city had a population of 138,479 as of the 2021 census. Along with Kitchener and Waterloo, Cambridg ...

, Canada. The company was publicly traded until 2021 when

Spire Global Spire Global, Inc. is a space-to-cloud data and analytics company that specializes in the tracking of global data sets powered by a large constellation of nanosatellites, such as the tracking of maritime, aviation and weather patterns. The comp ...

acquired the company.

History

In 2005,

COM DEV International Honeywell Aerospace (formerly COM DEV International) is a satellite technology, space sciences, and telecommunications company based in Cambridge, Ontario, Canada. The company has branches and offices in Ottawa, the United States, the United Kin ...

first recognized that the AIS messages being transmitted by major ships could potentially be received from space. COM DEV validated its AIS detection capability through aircraft trials in 2007 and launched a

nanosatellite A small satellite, miniaturized satellite, or smallsat is a satellite of low mass and size, usually under . While all such satellites can be referred to as "small", different classifications are used to categorize them based on mass. Satellites ca ...

(EV0) in April 2008. exactEarth commenced commercial operations in June 2009. In September 2010,

Hisdesat Hisdesat (, 'Hisdesat Strategic Services') is a Spanish company created in 2001 by Hispasat (43%), Ingeniería y Servicios Aeroespaciales (30%), EADS CASA (15%, now Airbus), Indra Sistemas (7%) and SENER (5%) with initial investment of 415 mill ...

acquired a 27% equity interest in the company for a cash investment of approximately CA$15 million, with COM DEV retaining a 73% equity interest. On 23 June 2015, exactEarth filed a Preliminary Prospectus with

Canadian Securities Administrators The Canadian Securities Administrators (CSA; , ACVM) is an umbrella organization of Canada's provincial and territorial securities regulators whose objective is to improve, coordinate, and harmonize regulation of the Canadian capital markets. ...

, announcing their intentions to launch an

Initial public offering An initial public offering (IPO) or stock launch is a public offering in which shares of a company are sold to institutional investors and usually also to retail (individual) investors. An IPO is typically underwritten by one or more investme ...

(IPO). However, on 5 November 2015, exactEarth's largest shareholder, COM DEV, announced plans for an acquisition by

Honeywell Honeywell International Inc. is an American publicly traded, multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina. It primarily operates in four areas of business: aerospace, building technologies, performance ma ...

with exactEarth spinning out into its own publicly traded company. exactEarth's prospectus was abandoned. COM DEV shareholders approved the acquisition on 21 January 2016, with each COM DEV shareholder receiving 0.1977 exactEarth stock for every COM DEV stock held. Final court approval of the acquisition came on 25 January 2016. On 9 February 2016, exactEarth became a publicly traded company, trading on the

Toronto Stock Exchange The Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX; french: Bourse de Toronto) is a stock exchange located in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It is the 10th largest exchange in the world and the third largest in North America based on market capitalization. Based in the ...

with the ticker symbol of XCT. For a while, HISDESAT Servicios Estratégicos S.A. was the largest stakeholder. However, in December 2021, the company was acquired by

and its stock were de-listed from the TSX.

Satellites

On 8 June 2015, exactEarth announced a partnership with Harris Corporation to build 58 AIS detecting payloads to be launched on board the Iridium NEXT satellite constellation. It is expected that this constellation will provide global average revisit times and customer data latency of less than one minute. As of October 2015, exactEarth operates a satellite constellation consisting of 9 satellites.

Projects

exactEarth satellite AIS data was used in security efforts at the

2010 Olympics )'' , nations = 82 , athletes = 2,626 , events = 86 in 7 sports (15 disciplines) , opening = February 12, 2010 , closing = February 28, 2010 , opened_by = Governor General Michaëlle Jean , cauldron = Catriona Le May DoanNancy GreeneWayne Gretz ...

and Paralympics. exactEarth satellite AIS data was used in the ship emission modelling project of the

Finnish Meteorological Institute The Finnish Meteorological Institute (FMI; fi, Ilmatieteen laitos; sv, Meteorologiska institutet) is the government agency responsible for gathering and reporting weather data and forecasts in Finland. It is a part of the Ministry of Transport ...

. exactEarth satellite AIS data aids ScanEx RDC in identifying illegal shipping within marine protected natural areas.

Awards

In 2009, exactEarth technology was recognized at the Ontario Premier's Innovation Awards for developing a satellite system for their work on satellite AIS.

References

{{Reflist

External links

Official Website
Telecommunications companies established in 2009 Companies formerly listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange Commercial Earth observation satellites 2009 establishments in Ontario