earth-observation
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Jerry Javornicky Is Teaching Computers to Read the Earth
The SpaceKnow co-founder went from fixing classmates' computers to turning satellite pixels into economic and security signals. His enduring idea is simple: physical reality leaves a trace, and software can learn to read it.
Dhenenjay Yadav Is Teaching Radar to See the Earth in Plain Sight
A childhood fascination with space became a practical obsession: make satellite data legible when clouds, smoke and darkness get in the way. Now the AxionOrbital co-founder is turning radar noise into a clearer view of a changing planet.
Andrew Peterson Is Turning Radar Satellites Into a Team Sport
The aerospace engineer behind Array Labs wants clusters of modest satellites to see more than one exquisite machine ever could. His bet is equal parts radar physics, manufacturing discipline and a founder’s reluctant conversion to sales.
Luke Fischer
Luke Fischer is the co-founder and CEO of SkyFi, an Austin-based Earth intelligence platform that lets businesses and governments order satellite imagery and analytics on demand, the way you'd hail an Uber. A former U.S. Army Special Operations aviator with 16 years on active duty, Fischer went on to lead flight operations at Uber and government operations at Joby Aviation before becoming an entrepreneur-in-residence at Shield Capital. He teamed up with investor Bill Perkins, who was frustrated that buying satellite imagery could take three to six months, and together they built a marketplace connecting more than 50 imagery providers. In January 2026 SkyFi raised an oversubscribed $12.7 million Series A to push deeper into AI-driven analytics.
Niosha Kayhani
Niosha Kayhani is Chief of Staff to the CEO at Muon Space, a Mountain View based end-to-end space systems company building LEO satellite constellations for climate, earth observation, and national security missions. A chartered mechanical engineer trained at the University of Portsmouth with an executive MBA from Warwick, he arrived in Silicon Valley after building innovation programs at Cubic in London and San Diego, a detour through Google in Dublin, and a first job tuning fiber-optic lasers at SPI. He holds ten-plus U.S. patents and, on the side, has founded Taurus Space, a company working on standards-aligned command-and-control for coalition defense networks.
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.
Johannes Galatsanos
Johannes Galatsanos is Co-Founder and CEO of Diffraqtion, a Boston-based quantum imaging startup that has built a quantum camera capable of recovering 95% of photon information lost by conventional sensors - translating to 20x higher resolution and 1,000x faster image processing than any existing optical system. A multilingual MIT and Oxford graduate with Greek-German roots, Galatsanos pivoted from leading AI and data transformation at Novartis to commercializing a decade of DARPA- and NASA-backed quantum photonics research. Diffraqtion won first prize at SLUSH 2025, secured a $4.2M pre-seed round in January 2026, and is targeting satellite launches for space domain awareness and Earth observation by 2028-2029.
Jonny Dyer
Jonny Dyer is the Co-Founder and CEO of Muon Space, a Mountain View-based end-to-end satellite constellation company building mission-optimized spacecraft for Earth intelligence, wildfire detection, and national security. A Stanford mechanical engineer who pitched varsity baseball and co-authored rocket propulsion models, he turned Skybox Imaging into Google's $500M acquisition, ran Google Maps' data collection fleet, led Lyft's autonomous vehicle platform, and then founded Muon in 2021. The company has raised $146M in Series B funding and operates a growing constellation including FireSat - a 50-satellite wildfire-monitoring system developed with Earth Fire Alliance.
Vishnu Sridhar
Vishnu Sridhar is the Cofounder and CEO of Matter Intelligence, a deep-tech startup building ultraspectral satellite sensors and geospatial AI to map the planet at molecular resolution. A Queens-raised Indian American engineer, Sridhar spent years at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory as Cognizant Engineer for the SuperCam instrument aboard the Mars Perseverance rover and as Flight Director for the Opportunity rover before pivoting to commercialize the same sensor physics for Earth. Matter Intelligence emerged from stealth in October 2024 with $12M in seed funding backed by Lowercarbon Capital, Toyota Ventures, and Mark Cuban, building toward EARTH-1, a satellite that will deliver more than 500x the information density of existing sensors.
Chris Biddy
Chris Biddy is the Co-Founder and CEO of Astro Digital, a California-founded aerospace company that has delivered 35+ satellites and operates 10+ missions in orbit. A mechanical engineer by training (M.S., Cal Poly San Luis Obispo), Biddy steered Astro Digital from an Earth observation startup into a full Mission-as-a-Service platform - cutting the cost, schedule risk, and complexity barrier for organizations wanting to put hardware in space. He previously led engineering at Canopus Systems, and has been active in the commercial smallsat movement since its early commercial days.