Spire Raises $40 million Series B

This week Spire Global announced that it has raised a $40 million Series B investment, bringing the total raised by the three-year old startup to ~$80 million. Spire will now begin to more aggressively commercialize its nano-satellite constellation, putting 100 nano-sats into Low-Earth Orbit by 2017. These remote sensing satellites will power a big data company that seeks to revolutionize how commercial weather data is collected using GPS-RO, the frequency with which ships and assets are tracked on open ocean, and more. Whereas the rest of the world is focused on land and imagery, Spire is focused on the other 70 percent of the globe that is covered by water, and is focused on all the other remote senses outside of imagery. The constellation of 100 satellites by 2017 will have material impact on the size and scope of weather raw data collection, allowing models to synthesize more data, therefore improving forecasts and helping mitigate cost associated with lack of accuracy in weather data.