A stealthy Seattle startup called TerraByte AI is unveiling a software platform that uses artificial intelligence to sift through real-time satellite data for geospatial gems.
TerraByte’s “Earth Search Engine” analyzes streams of satellite imagery, recognizes features of interest and connects the dots through natural-language queries. The platform’s key advantage is that its data set doesn’t have to go through the laborious, expensive process of manual annotation.
“We’re just using self-supervised learning techniques to essentially understand the pixels without having to manually annotate it,” CEO and co-founder Rishi Madhok told GeekWire.
“There are many applications that you can do, like identifying power-line segments, finding parking lots near highways without EV charging stalls, watching container ships entering port,” he explained. “If you want to monitor the Strait of Hormuz, you can use our models to do that. Deforestation areas, open-pit mining in Arizona — all of these are very different concepts, but our model is able to understand them because it’s a foundational model.”
TerraByte is laying out its approach this week in Huntsville, Ala., at an ESA-NASA workshop on AI models for Earth observation. A hands-on session is scheduled on Wednesday, and the company’s co-founder and chief technology officer, Fuxun Yu, is due to make an oral presentation on Thursday.
Madhok and Yu founded TerraByte last year, with operations split between Seattle and San Francisco. Madhok previously led geospatial AI initiatives at Microsoft Planetary Computer, while Yu worked as a principal research manager at Microsoft and led the company’s Geospatial Foundational Model project.
On the financial front, Madhok said the venture has received pre-seed funding from Ascend, PSL Ventures and angel investors, though he declined to specify the size of the investment.
Kirby Winfield, founding general partner of Ascend, said in an emailed statement that TerraByte “is building the foundation model layer for satellite intelligence. … They’re creating the foundational API and AI infrastructure that will power the next generation of location intelligence applications.”
Vivek Ladsariya, managing director at Pioneer Square Labs and general partner of PSL Ventures, said his fund invested in TerraByte “because geospatial data is one of the most consequential and underserved categories in enterprise tech.”
“The volume of geospatial data is growing exponentially, yet most organizations still can’t access or act on it effectively,” Ladsariya said via email. “Rishi and Fuxun are rare operators — they’ve lived this problem firsthand and know exactly what it takes to build the infrastructure layer that unlocks it. TerraByte is that layer, and we think it becomes foundational.”
While single-sensor foundation models already exist to analyze the wide spectrum of sensor data captured by satellite companies, Madhok noted that “TerraByte is the first model layer to natively fuse optical, synthetic aperture radar, thermal and hyperspectral in one foundation model.” That multi-sensor approach could support a rapid response to fast-changing situations such as natural disasters.
“For example, we can work with utility companies or even with first responders, and when there’s a wildfire, they can ask for things like, ‘Show me neighborhoods and power-line segments within one mile of an active wildfire in California or Washington,’” Madhok said. “Because when catastrophes happen, you need to be able to monitor them instantly in real time, and there aren’t a lot of technologies out there which can actually give them the insights.”
Risk assessment is another potential application — for example, addressing the challenges that insurance companies face in evaluating wildfire risk. “If they’re able to characterize the risk well by understanding if there are high-risk things like vegetation encroachment, you’re able to have better pricing on some of those things,” he said.
Madhok said the software could also be installed on orbiting satellites to filter data before it’s downlinked. That could minimize the time delay and costs that might otherwise be associated with downlinking massive amounts of data from an Earth observation satellite or an orbital data center.
“Our goal is to build a model which not only works on the ground station, but also works on the edge, so that it helps all these time-sensitive applications to monitor things,” Madhok said. He said the company is already working on arrangements for an on-orbit demonstration.
While TerraByte is still refining its commercial strategy, the immediate focus is on enterprise clients. “Our business startup use case is more focused on B2B, so we’re working with large enterprise licenses, but eventually it will be subscription-based,” Madhok said.
TerraByte isn’t the only company offering geospatial data analysis. Other players in the market include Google Earth Engine and BlackSky Spectra. Still more companies, such as Starcloud and Sophia Space, are working on plans to put computing power on the edge in space. Will TerraByte be able to compete?
“I see Sophia Space and a lot of similar companies who have compute up in space as partners,” Madhok said. “A lot of the companies out there, whether they’re building satellites or collecting imagery, are really good at doing what they do — which is building satellites or sending computers up into space. Our DNA is to build the best geospatial models out there, and that’s what our goal is.”
