blackshark.ai has raised $35m in an oversubscribed funding round from European investors.
The company, based in the US and Austria, is known for creating the first 3D digital twin of the entire Earth for Microsoft’s Flight Simulator and the funding will be used for strategic technology development.
The blackshark.ai technology takes massive volumes of raw data from satellite and aerial imagery into semantically labelled geospatial Digital Twins. This enables rapid and accurate object detection and classification at scale without the need for extensive, costly, and time-consuming training data, but also enables comprehensive analysis of land use and land cover.
Traditional 3D mapping based on photogrammetry is slow and costly, and requires a large amount of imagery, while the blackshark.ai technology can create 3D visualization for digital twins, training & simulation with one single image.
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Existing investors Point72 Ventures, M12 Microsoft’s Venture Fund, and Maxar were joined by In-Q-Tel (IQT), Safran, ISAI Cap Venture, Capgemini’s VC Fund managed by ISAI, Einstein Industries Ventures, Interwoven Ventures (formerly ROBO Global Ventures), Ourcrowd, Gaingels and OpAmp Capital in the extended Series A round.
“The new partnerships strengthen our vision to democratize high-frequency 3D mapping applications across an extensive range of geospatial use cases, both public and private,” said Michael Putz, CEO of blackshark.ai,
“blackshark.ai’s technology has shown great potential for applications in renewables, critical infrastructure monitoring, real estate property management, urban planning, and autonomous vehicles, among many others,” said Lucia Sinapi-Thomas, Capgemini Ventures Managing Director.
“The expertise in high-frequency mapping using satellite imagery unlocks new potential for Safran’s development in Position, Navigation, and Timing applied to all domains such as autonomous or collaborative missions as well as training and simulation,” said Florent Illat, CEO of Safran Corporate Ventures.
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