aerial-imagery
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The founder teaching insurers to read a house from the sky
He runs an intelligence unit's worth of pattern recognition on the roofs of 160 million buildings. The question that started it was not about roofs at all.
Canibuild
Canibuild is an AI-powered site-planning platform that answers construction's first question - can I build here? Builders, contractors and developers use it to check a site's feasibility, zoning, setbacks and utilities, generate 3D site plans and produce branded quotes in under 60 seconds. Founded in Sydney in 2020, the platform covers Australia, New Zealand, the United States and Canada and has run more than 4 million site assessments.
Near Space Labs
Near Space Labs is a Brooklyn-based earth-imaging company that flies small autonomous robots called Swift into the stratosphere on helium balloons to capture 7-centimeter-resolution imagery of the ground below. Founded in 2017, it delivers frequent, analysis-ready aerial data to property and casualty insurers, governments, utilities and environmental groups at a fraction of the cost of traditional planes or satellites, positioning balloon-borne imaging as a scalable, low-emission alternative for monitoring cities, infrastructure and disasters.
GeoX
GeoX is an Israeli-founded geospatial AI company that turns aerial imagery, satellite data and ground-level images into detailed 3D models of individual buildings. Insurers, reinsurers, banks and public agencies use its property database - covering roughly 160 million US properties and expanding across Europe, Japan and Australia - to assess roof condition, elevation and exposure to fires, floods and storms without sending anyone into the field. The company raised a $19M Series A in 2024 (led by Flashpoint), bringing total funding to $23M.
Rema Matevosyan
Rema (Hripsime) Matevosyan is the co-founder and CEO of Near Space Labs, a Brooklyn-based company that flies helium-lifted robotic aircraft called Swift into the stratosphere to photograph the Earth at 7-centimeter resolution. Born and educated in Armenia, trained as an applied mathematician in Moscow, she left a PhD program two weeks into an entrepreneurship class to build what she calls her own little space program. In April 2025 the company closed a $20M Series B led by Bold Capital Partners, bringing total funding above $40M, with insurance carriers as anchor customers using the imagery to model wildfire and hurricane damage.
Aerobotics
Aerobotics is a Cape Town-founded agritech company that turns aerial and smartphone imagery into tree-level intelligence for fruit and nut growers. Using drones, satellites and machine-learning algorithms feeding its Aeroview platform, it counts trees, flags missing or sick plants, tracks pests and disease, and forecasts yields with size, color and quality measurements - helping growers across roughly 18 countries protect crop value and make data-driven decisions.
Ceres AI
Ceres AI (formerly Ceres Imaging) is an Oakland-based agtech company that flies fixed-wing aircraft over farmland with custom-built spectral sensors, then uses machine learning to turn the resulting imagery into plant-level insight on water, nutrients and crop stress. Founded in 2014 during California's drought, the company now serves growers, agribusinesses, lenders and insurers across four continents.
Ramsey Masri
Ramsey Masri is the CEO of Ceres AI (formerly Ceres Imaging), an Oakland-based agricultural intelligence platform that has analyzed over 17 billion plant-level measurements across 32 million acres and 40+ crop types worldwide. A UC Berkeley graduate who grew up on a family farm in Peru and spent 20 years as a California grape grower in Napa Valley, Masri bridges the worlds of technology, data analytics, and hands-on farming. Before Ceres, he served as COO at Zendrive and spent his early career at Oracle working under Larry Ellison, Ray Lane, and Tom Siebel. Under his leadership, Ceres rebranded as Ceres AI, raised a $13M Series D round led by Remus Capital in 2024-2025, was named to TIME Magazine's 2024 Top GreenTech Companies list, and made history by appointing the first AI board member in the agriculture industry.