Luke Fischer is Co-Founder and CEO at SkyFi, an Earth intelligence platform company that simplifies access to geospatial data and analytics.
How did SkyFi get started?
My co-founder Bill Perkins was trying to buy satellite imagery to inform investment decisions in the natural gas and oil sectors. The process, however, was ridiculous. Trying to purchase up to $1,000,000 worth of satellite imagery took three to six months, and required dealing with all the major providers. He got so frustrated that he wanted to start something new, and that’s when we met and formed SkyFi. Our mission was to make satellite imagery acquisition easy for everyone.
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How does someone use SkyFi to get satellite imagery?
Let’s say you’re in the mining industry and want to look at the largest mine in Utah. You drag and drop a box over that location in our app and specify the time you want an image. We show you the price for the type of image you want there and then, you “add to cart,” and checkout.
That action tasks a satellite. Our algorithm goes to our constellation and determines which satellite is best for capturing your requested image. This is all transparent to you. You get the image delivered as soon as the conditions are right, which could be the same day. In winter, where there’s more cloud cover, you might wait a week or two.
What differentiates SkyFi’s offering?
Getting the data you wanted from a satellite before SkyFi was a manual process. You had to call someone to book you a slot that was limited to when their satellite would be passing over the location you needed. This process relied on phone calls and emails despite the rise of smartphones and API-based apps.
We have embraced new technologies and built a team full of former Uber engineers that understand APIs and how to more intuitively connect to satellite companies. We actually educated many satellite companies on building APIs because they’d been selling to government customers who didn’t require them. With mature web and mobile technology in place, we have built an application that connects via APIs to providers worldwide. We don’t build satellites or most analytics. Rather, we partner with companies globally through APIs. This gives us the largest virtual constellation of assets in the world available for people to use.
Why does satellite imagery production take so long?
The biggest customer overall is still the U.S. government and that slows things down. It’s the largest purchaser of geospatial imagery and analytics in the world. Companies launching satellites and building analytics therefore naturally cater to that largest customer. Their sales cycles even model the government acquisition process, with commission-based salespeople selling only to various government departments. But because they cater to this slow, bureaucratic process, getting answers from space remains slow and complex for commercial users.
This is changing now. Over the years, the cost to reach space and launch satellites has dramatically decreased and continues to fall. This has led to more innovation and more satellites being launched. SkyFi is the result of this greater accessibility. We’ve been able to build a new imagery solution rather than just providing an incrementally better way to resell data. With SkyFi you can push a button on your phone or computer and task a satellite to retrieve the imagery you need.
Tell us how SkyFi’s model translates to working with government and military customers.
With so many satellites being launched and so many analytics available, governments need a one-stop-shop platform to access data that supports various military organizations. We’re significantly speeding up the government cycle. Our initial work shows that the process before SkyFi to get answers to warfighters took anywhere from 5 to 16 days. We’re able to do it in three to five hours through automation. That’s a dramatic change in speed.
What’s on the horizon for SkyFi?
Artificial intelligence. I don’t say that for hype. AI isn’t hype. There’s no “AI experiment” anymore; AI is here, and every industry needs to embrace it at some level. Our vision for the future involves embracing AI for speed. Even though we’ve already created a step change in capabilities, we’re building AI capabilities for the government that will allow users to get the data and insight they need very quickly. Instead of manually dropping boxes and clicking analytics, you’re just telling an agent what you want, and we’re enabling it.
How do you define “deep tech”?
Deep tech is bringing sci-fi to life. Deep tech is where you’re combining all facets of hardware and software, but more importantly, exploring and creating things that have never been done before. It takes a large amount of science, product insight, and a little bit of magic to make it happen because it’s incredibly complex. It’s the combination of everything. We’re at a surface where not everyone can or should do it.