Urban Sky is a stratospheric technology and remote sensing company and the firm has announced an over-subscribed $9.75 million Series A financing round co-led by New Legacy Ventures, Lerer Hippeau and Lavrock Ventures, with participation from Catapult Ventures, Union Labs VC, DA Ventures (a Denver Angels Affiliate), and TenOneTen Ventures.
The company will use the funding to scale its commercial imaging operation, develop advanced stratospheric technology and broaden its sensor portfolio. Urban Sky’s technology enables broad-area, high-resolution remote sensing at data acquisition costs significantly less than all other aerial platforms.
The company invented the Microballoon™, the first small, precisely placeable, fully reusable, and rapidly deployable remote sensing balloon. With the announcement of this Series A, Urban Sky will scale its flight and imaging operation to more than 15 U.S. states, commercializing the technology for multiple applications, including insurance analytics, utilities monitoring, disaster response, wildfire monitoring, environmental analysis and, more broadly, to capture high-resolution (<10cm GSD) remote sensing data at unprecedented refresh rates above urban centers and environmental areas of interest.
This technology will offer customers access to more, better remote sensing data and insights than was previously possible. Stratospheric balloons have historically not been used for remote sensing applications due to their inability to fly over desired areas at specific times. Urban Sky’s Microballoon™ enables reliable, high-resolution remote sensing due to its small form factor and ability to launch from mobile locations in just minutes with minimal personnel. This mobile launch system coupled with advanced flight modeling software and safe, controlled descent enables precise placement of these systems over desired areas.
Urban Sky pairs its Microballoons with custom, ultra-lightweight imaging payloads designed and built in-house. Those payloads, all weighing less than 6 pounds, are operational and routinely capturing ~10cm resolution natural color (RGB) imagery and ~3.5m long-wave-infrared (LWIR) data for paying customers in the Rocky Mountain region.
Urban Sky’s co-founders, CEO Andrew Antonio and CTO Jared Leidich have significant experience in stratospheric flight technology and applications. Leidich led the Spacesuit team for Project StratEx, the highest human balloon flight and skydive of all time. The leader and pilot of StratEx, former SVP of Engineering at Google, Alan Eustace, will serve as an independent Board member following this fundraise.
“Our team is passionate about enabling access to more and better Earth Observation data to fuel new insights about our world. The Stratosphere is one of the last, virtually untapped commercial frontiers, and Urban Sky plans to commercialize this layer of Earth’s atmosphere for the benefit of all humanity. Our vision is to finally enable safe, smart, and routine utilization of the Stratosphere for a variety of applications, all the while building a sustainable organization geared towards sound financial performance.” — Andrew Antonio, Co-Founder and CEO, Urban Sky
“We believe that Urban Sky represents a category-defining business led by an exceptional and uniquely experienced founding team. We’re excited to partner with Urban Sky to help enable unparalleled access to the stratosphere and the insights and data that will come with it.” — Alex Wong, Partner, New Legacy Ventures