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 A constellation is an area on the celestial sphere in which a group of visible stars forms a perceived pattern or outline, typically representing an animal, mythological subject, or inanimate object. The origins of the earliest constellation ...

of nanosatellites, such as the tracking of maritime, aviation and weather patterns. The company currently operates a fleet of more than 110

CubeSat A CubeSat is a class of miniaturized satellite based around a form factor consisting of cubes. CubeSats have a mass of no more than per unit, and often use commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) components for their electronics and structure. CubeSats ...

s, the second largest commercial constellation by number of satellites, and the largest by number of sensors. The satellites are integrally designed and built in-house. It has launched more than 140 satellites to orbit since its creation. The company has offices in

San Francisco San Francisco (; Spanish for " Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the fourth most populous in California and 17t ...

Boulder In geology, a boulder (or rarely bowlder) is a rock fragment with size greater than in diameter. Smaller pieces are called cobbles and pebbles. While a boulder may be small enough to move or roll manually, others are extremely massive. In ...

Washington DC ) , image_skyline = , image_caption = Clockwise from top left: the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall, United States Capitol, Logan Circle, Jefferson Memorial, White House, Adams Morgan, ...

Glasgow Glasgow ( ; sco, Glesca or ; gd, Glaschu ) is the most populous city in Scotland and the fourth-most populous city in the United Kingdom, as well as being the 27th largest city by population in Europe. In 2020, it had an estimated popu ...

Luxembourg Luxembourg ( ; lb, Lëtzebuerg ; french: link=no, Luxembourg; german: link=no, Luxemburg), officially the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, ; french: link=no, Grand-Duché de Luxembourg ; german: link=no, Großherzogtum Luxemburg is a small lan ...

Singapore Singapore (), officially the Republic of Singapore, is a sovereign island country and city-state in maritime Southeast Asia. It lies about one degree of latitude () north of the equator, off the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, bor ...

, and Cambridge (Ontario).

History

Early Years

Spire was originally known as NanoSatisfi Inc. NanoSatisfi was founded in June 2012 in

International Space University The International Space University (ISU) is dedicated to the discovery, research, and development of outer space and its applications for peaceful purposes, through international and multidisciplinary education and research programs. ISU was f ...

graduates Peter Platzer, Jeroen Cappaert and Joel Spark as part of

ArduSat ArduSat is an Arduino based nanosatellite, based on the CubeSat standard. It contains a set of Arduino boards and sensors. The general public will be allowed to use these Arduinos and sensors for their own creative purposes while they are in spac ...

, a project aiming to “democratize access to space”. Tests for early prototypes were conducted over the summer and the fall through a high-altitude balloon. This effort was partly financed through

crowdfunding Crowdfunding is the practice of funding a project or venture by raising money from a large number of people, typically via the internet. Crowdfunding is a form of crowdsourcing and alternative finance. In 2015, over was raised worldwide by cro ...

, with a

KickStarter Kickstarter is an American public benefit corporation based in Brooklyn, New York, that maintains a global crowdfunding platform focused on creativity. The company's stated mission is to "help bring creative projects to life". As of July 2021, ...

that raised Spire $106,330. In November the company signed an agreement with NanoRacks for the deployment of two satellites in what was to become “the first U.S. Commercial Satellite Deployment from the

International Space Station The International Space Station (ISS) is the largest Modular design, modular space station currently in low Earth orbit. It is a multinational collaborative project involving five participating space agencies: NASA (United States), Roscosmos ( ...

”. In order to raise the capital required for the manufacturing of those satellites, the company incubated with Lemnos Labs. It raised investments totaling $1.5M in a

seed round Seed money, sometimes known as seed funding or seed capital, is a form of securities offering in which an investor invests capital in a startup company in exchange for an equity stake or convertible note stake in the company. The term ''seed'' su ...

Shasta Ventures Shasta Ventures is an early-stage venture capital investment firm located in Silicon Valley that invests in enterprise and technology consumer startups. It is located on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park. Funds Shasta's second fund of US$250 milli ...

Lemnos Labs
E-merge, Grishin Robotics, an
Beamonte Investments
in February 2013. A year after signing with NanoRacks, on November 19, 2013, both ArduSat-1 and ArduSat-X (1U CubeSats) were successfully released from the Kibo Experiment Module of the International Space Station and quickly started transmitting data to Spire servers. Following this experimentation, Spire engineers opted to focus on 3U nanosatellites to start porting more complex

payload Payload is the object or the entity which is being carried by an aircraft or launch vehicle. Sometimes payload also refers to the carrying capacity of an aircraft or launch vehicle, usually measured in terms of weight. Depending on the nature of ...

s, launching the first iteration of its standard satellite format, Lemur-1, with the Dnepr rocket in June 2014, transiting from 1U to 3U in only seven months, and launching its first prototype just two years after incorporation. On the basis of this early success, Spire announced in July a follow-up $25M Series A funding round led b
Will Porteous
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and backed by Emerge, Mitsui & Co.">Mitsui & Co. Global Investment, and Mousse Partners Capital. The following month, the company announced that ArduSat would be spun-off of the company and would focus exclusively on educational technology in partnership with U.S. high schools. Shortly after, Spire opened its Singapore office in late 2014 and started steadily increasing its network of ground stations.

Growth

On June 30, 2015, the company announced a $40 Million Series B led b
Promus Ventures
with participation from

Bessemer Venture Partners Bessemer Venture Partners (Bessemer) is an American venture capital firm. The firm has over $19 billion under management and invests globally, with offices in San Francisco, Redwood City, New York City, Boston, Israel, India, and London. Besseme ...

and Jump Capital. in order to help finance the first batches of Lemur satellites. The first Lemur-2 were launched in September 2015 through the

Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle The Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) is an expendable medium-lift launch vehicle designed and operated by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO). It was developed to allow India to launch its Indian Remote Sensing (IRS) satellites ...

-XL, making Spire the first US-based operator to launch from India. This launch inaugurated the Spire tradition to leave the naming of each satellite to employees, with the first 3 Lemurs christened respectively Joel, Peter and Jeroen after the company's co-founders. Facing increasing pressure to

mass-produce Mass production, also known as flow production or continuous production, is the production of substantial amounts of standardized products in a constant flow, including and especially on assembly lines. Together with job production and batch ...

satellites and constrained by the limited space in its San Francisco office, Spire opened an office in

in February 2015, initially leveraging Clyde Space's facilities, before opening its own full-fledged

cleanroom A cleanroom or clean room is an engineered space, which maintains a very low concentration of airborne particulates. It is well isolated, well-controlled from contamination, and actively cleansed. Such rooms are commonly needed for scientif ...

for satellite manufacturing in December 2015. The city was chosen to leverage the local know-how of what is widely considered the leading European ecosystem in small satellite production and establish a first foothold in Europe. These facilities enabled Spire to quickly produce a first batch of four nanosatellites (launched in September) before manufacturing a full eight Lemur satellites ahead of an

Atlas V Atlas V is an expendable launch system and the fifth major version in the Atlas launch vehicle family. It was originally designed by Lockheed Martin, now being operated by United Launch Alliance (ULA), a joint venture between Lockheed Mart ...

launch in March 2016. This launch saw Spire cross the line of 10 simultaneously operating satellites in June of that year, following deployment from the ISS. Two additional launches were conducted that year, putting the total satellites sent to space by the company that year at sixteen, confirming its ability to industrialize the manufacturing process of its nanosatellites. Concomitantly, Spire opened a second U.S. campus in

Boulder, Colorado Boulder is a home rule city that is the county seat and most populous municipality of Boulder County, Colorado, United States. The city population was 108,250 at the 2020 United States census, making it the 12th most populous city in Colora ...

in January 2016. The company hired Dave Ector – the former program manager for

NASA The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA ) is an independent agency of the US federal government responsible for the civil space program, aeronautics research, and space research. NASA was established in 1958, succeedin ...

’s

COSMIC Cosmic commonly refers to: * The cosmos, a concept of the universe Cosmic may also refer to: Media * ''Cosmic'' (album), an album by Bazzi * Afro/Cosmic music * "Cosmic", a song by Kylie Minogue from the album '' X'' * CosM.i.C, a member of ...

satellites – and Alexander MacDonald – former director of

NOAA The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (abbreviated as NOAA ) is an United States scientific and regulatory agency within the United States Department of Commerce that forecasts weather, monitors oceanic and atmospheric conditio ...

’s Earth System Research Laboratory – and started drawing on the resources of the local weather ecosystem (powered by the

University of Colorado Boulder The University of Colorado Boulder (CU Boulder, CU, or Colorado) is a public research university in Boulder, Colorado. Founded in 1876, five months before Colorado became a state, it is the flagship university of the University of Colorado sy ...

) to kickstart its weather program in the city. To this effect, the team started working on Spire's own

Global Navigation Satellite System A satellite navigation or satnav system is a system that uses satellites to provide autonomous geo-spatial positioning. It allows satellite navigation devices to determine their location (longitude, latitude, and altitude/elevation) to high pr ...

Radio Occultation Radio occultation (RO) is a remote sensing technique used for measuring the physical properties of a planetary atmosphere or ring system. Atmospheric radio occultation Atmospheric radio occultation relies on the detection of a change in a radio ...

(GNSS-RO) payload, enabling the company to constantly collect highly accurate data on local atmospheric properties which greatly enhance the forecasting abilities of weather models. This program quickly enabled Spire to participate in the inaugural Commercial Weather Data Pilot program of the U.S. National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration in September 2016. Spire's participation was confirmed and broadened in September 2018 for the second round of the CWDP program. This program aims to enable weather-focused administrations to procure data (largely obtained from Radio Occultation profiles) created by private entities in order to improve the precision of the publicly available weather models. Over 2017, the company launched 6 missions, yielding an additional 36 operated satellites despite the

critical failure Reliability engineering is a sub-discipline of systems engineering that emphasizes the ability of equipment to function without failure. Reliability describes the ability of a system or component to function under stated conditions for a specifie ...

of a

Soyuz Soyuz is a transliteration of the Cyrillic text Союз ( Russian and Ukrainian, 'Union'). It can refer to any union, such as a trade union (''profsoyuz'') or the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (Сою́з Сове́тских Социалис ...

vehicle carrying 10 Lemurs in November. Spire closed the year by completing a $70m Series C led by the Government of

(through its national Luxembourg Future Fund), and opened its second European campus in the city, enabling the company's access to regional talent and facilities. This round put the total amount of capital raised by Spire at $140.5m. In early 2018, Spire participated in the second flight of

Rocket Lab Rocket Lab is a public American aerospace manufacturer and launch service provider, with a New Zealand subsidiary. The company operates lightweight Electron orbital rockets, which provide dedicated launches for small satellites. Rocket Lab also ...

’s

Electron The electron ( or ) is a subatomic particle with a negative one elementary electric charge. Electrons belong to the first generation of the lepton particle family, and are generally thought to be elementary particles because they have n ...

rocket, and was selected for

Arianespace Arianespace SA is a French company founded in 1980 as the world's first commercial launch service provider. It undertakes the operation and marketing of the Ariane programme. The company offers a number of different launch vehicles: the heavy ...

’s

Vega Vega is the brightest star in the northern constellation of Lyra. It has the Bayer designation α Lyrae, which is Latinised to Alpha Lyrae and abbreviated Alpha Lyr or α Lyr. This star is relatively close at only from the Sun, a ...

Proof of Concept, further broadening its launch portfolio. It participated in a total of 7 launch missions – yielding 28 new operated satellites – and developed its own ADS-B payload able to track the movement of equipped airplanes across areas that conventional ground radars can not cover, and that is quickly becoming a standard following the MH370 disappearance. In 2019, the company formalized its first

business unit A strategic business unit (SBU) in business strategic management, is a profit center which focuses on product offering and market segment. SBUs typically have a discrete marketing plan, analysis of competition, and marketing campaign, even though ...

a
Spire Maritime
based in Luxembourg, and launched its 100th Lemur satellite on April 1st. On March 1, 2021, the company announced an agreement to go public via a merger with the SPAC (special-purpose acquisition company) Navsight. The merger, completed in the third quarter of 2021, valued the company at $1.6 billion. Spire's stock began trading in New York stock exchange on August 17, 2021. Spire had a market value of $1.6 billion and about $265 million in cash on its books after the close of the SPAC merger. In the year before, 2020, Spire had booked $36 million in revenue. Also at the time of stock market debut, the company had more than 110 satellites in orbit and ground stations in 16 countries, with more than 70 antennas on its ground stations. At the time, Spire did not expect to grow its constellation of Lemur satellites, as the company did not see “any customer demand” that would require a larger constellation of satellites. Despite not growing its constellation, Spire would continue to build and launch satellites as the Lemur satellites are refreshed on a three-year hardware replacement cycle. When listing in the stock exchange Spire had offices in four countries: the U.S., the U.K., Luxembourg and Singapore and customers in nearly 30 countries. Due to missing projected revenue targets and rising losses, Spire's market value started falling after the first quarterly report. As of April 30, 2022, the company had a market cap of $231 million, less than half of the $557 million in capital invested in the company, and less than the cash on its books after the close of the SPAC merger.

Satellite

Spire's Lemur satellites are flexible platforms built to operate a variety of in-house or hosted payloads. It currently commercializes its platform on a “Space-as-a-Service” offering with

aerospace Aerospace is a term used to collectively refer to the atmosphere and outer space. Aerospace activity is very diverse, with a multitude of commercial, industrial and military applications. Aerospace engineering consists of aeronautics and ast ...

and

defence Defense or defence may refer to: Tactical, martial, and political acts or groups * Defense (military), forces primarily intended for warfare * Civil defense, the organizing of civilians to deal with emergencies or enemy attacks * Defense indus ...

customers. Spire designs, builds, tests, and operates all its satellites in-house at its Glasgow offices. The company uses minimally adapted COTS electronics to reduce cost. The satellites are placed in

low Earth orbit A low Earth orbit (LEO) is an orbit around Earth with a period of 128 minutes or less (making at least 11.25 orbits per day) and an eccentricity less than 0.25. Most of the artificial objects in outer space are in LEO, with an altitude never m ...

and are scheduled to be retired and replaced every two to three years. Spire adheres to internationally recognized guidelines for disposal of old satellites. The company's satellites are multi-sensor. Data types such as Automatic Identification System (AIS) service are used for tracking sea vessels. This data is valuable for use in

illegal fishing Illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing (IUU) is an issue around the world. Fishing industry observers believe IUU occurs in most fisheries, and accounts for up to 30% of total catches in some important fisheries. Illegal fishing takes p ...

, trade monitoring, maritime domain awareness,

insurance Insurance is a means of protection from financial loss in which, in exchange for a fee, a party agrees to compensate another party in the event of a certain loss, damage, or injury. It is a form of risk management, primarily used to hedge ...

, asset tracking,

search and rescue Search and rescue (SAR) is the search for and provision of aid to people who are in distress or imminent danger. The general field of search and rescue includes many specialty sub-fields, typically determined by the type of terrain the search ...

, and prevention of

piracy Piracy is an act of robbery or criminal violence by ship or boat-borne attackers upon another ship or a coastal area, typically with the goal of stealing cargo and other valuable goods. Those who conduct acts of piracy are called pirates, v ...

, among others. Spire's Sense product leveraging the company's AIS data set was officially launched in February 2019. The GNSS-RO weather payload measure

temperature Temperature is a physical quantity that expresses quantitatively the perceptions of hotness and coldness. Temperature is measured with a thermometer. Thermometers are calibrated in various temperature scales that historically have relied o ...

pressure Pressure (symbol: ''p'' or ''P'') is the force applied perpendicular to the surface of an object per unit area over which that force is distributed. Gauge pressure (also spelled ''gage'' pressure)The preferred spelling varies by country a ...

, among other key characteristics across a “slice” of the

atmosphere An atmosphere () is a layer of gas or layers of gases that envelop a planet, and is held in place by the gravity of the planetary body. A planet retains an atmosphere when the gravity is great and the temperature of the atmosphere is low. A ...

, or "profile". These characteristics are highly valuable for public and private weather forecasters across the world as they strongly increase the forecasting capabilities of

weather models Numerical weather prediction (NWP) uses mathematical models of the atmosphere and oceans to predict the weather based on current weather conditions. Though first attempted in the 1920s, it was not until the advent of computer simulation in t ...

. ADS-B sensors were launched in 2018 to permanently track aircraft across all skies. This data is getting increasingly regarded as the new standard for modern aviation as it enables air controllers and companies to constantly monitor aircraft across isolated areas and oceans which ground-based radars are not able to cover. In 2020, Spire announced its intention to add intersatellite links to its satellites, allowing for lower latency between data collection and delivery to a gateway site.

References

External links