Descartes Labs announced the close of $30 million in Series B financing. Three investors participated in the round: March Capital Partners, Crosslink Capital, and Cultivian Sandbox Venture Partners.
Descartes Labs launched as a spin-out from Los Alamos National Laboratory in April, 2015, as an agricultural predictive model. Initially the technology was applied to analyze corn and soy production in the United States. Using imagery from satellite constellations, weather data, and other datasets, the model accurately predicted yield six months prior to the end of the growing season.
Capitalizing on the confluence of advances in AI and high-performance cloud computing, along with the rapid increase of sensors capturing information all over the globe, Descartes Labs has created an enterprise data refinery that enables organizations to model and predict changes in natural resources and the entire value chains in which they operate. With an initial focus on satellite imagery, Descartes Labs processes a pipeline of data flows from all of the major satellite constellations, at scale, to provide instant access to analysis-ready images of the entire world via a massive, searchable, on-demand interface.