Hydrosat…so hot right now.

The thermal imaging company with offices in the US and Europe announced a $60M Series B today to keep up with growing demand for its EO data.

• The round was led by Hartree Partners, Subutai Capital Partners, and Space4Earth.

• Truffle Capital, the Luxembourg Future Fund, OTB Ventures, Blue Bear Capital, Statkraft Ventures, Cultivation Capital, and Santa Barbara Venture Partners also joined.

Fireworks: The company plans to use the new funds to grow its footprint beyond its two sats in orbit. The company is constructing its next block of satellites, expected to be operational next year, which aim to capture higher resolution imagery and help customers spot smaller changes in temperatures on the ground.

The money, however, will also help the company grow on Earth. Over the next 18 months, Hydrosat expects to double its workforce, hiring more engineers, but focusing heavily on the company’s business development efforts in response to accelerating demand across the board.  

“We’re investing heavily in our global expansion,” CEO Pieter Fossel told Payload. “It’s doubling down on our US government business, which has always been core. It’s expanding our international and sovereign solutions, so bringing our capabilities to friendly international governments…both in agriculture and resource management, but also in national security.”

Moths to a flame: Over the past few years, the increasing appetite for EO imagery and the rise of AI have combined to make Hydrosat an attractive partner to defense and commercial customers alike.

“Our data is really built to be AI ready and machine readable,” Fossel explained. “You have a location, you have a temperature signature, and you have a point in time, and those three elements can all be fed directly into AI models.”

As a result, Hydrosat has seen accelerating interest in its use as a scanning tool to spot changes that would otherwise be hard to detect. For commercial customers, this means spotting the water usage and soil health trends of an agricultural operation, or the thermal signature of an industrial facility.

In the defense world, Hydrosat increasingly plays a role in an intermingled ecosystem of EO capabilities.

• Hydrosat’s spacecraft capture 10M+ sq km of imagery every day, which is well suited for a “tip and cue” arrangement, where Hydrosat spots a temperature anomaly—a boat in the ocean, troops massing on a border etc.—and high resolution optical or SAR sats take a closer look.

• Unlike optical EO imagery, Hydrosat’s spacecraft can gather valuable insights at night. They can also spot heat signatures below camouflage, in dense forest cover, or even below the ground.

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