Interrogating The Planet

Orbital Insight’s software can measure economic activity from crop yields to oil use

- Dimitra Kessenides

Google’s long-running quest has been “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” This corporate mantra focuses, for the most part, on arranging and analyzing data produced by humans, be it websites, books, calendar appointments, or the location of businesses around a city. But what if instead of gathering the world’s information from the ground up, you could begin organizing all of that data from above by looking down at Planet Earth itself? This has been the mission of Orbital Insight.

Founded in 2013, Orbital pulls in images snapped by satellites and uses them to watch and analyze human activity. It can monitor the number of cars in Walmart parking lots across the U.S. to see how busy the back-to-school shopping season is, the number of new homes going up in Houston, the amount of oil in China’s storage tanks, or the production activity at Tesla’s auto factory. Traditional economic data also measure these types of things, but Orbital says its images are more accurate indicators of what’s happening on Earth. “What we are selling is truths about the world,” says James Crawford, its founder and chief executive officer.

To pull useful information out of thousands upon thousands of images, Orbital built a complex software system infused with artificial intelligence. It’s spent years holding the hands of hedge funds, government agencies, and other customers to teach them how the software works and how to customize analysis, acting almost like a consultant. On May 15 the company released Orbital Go, a product it’s billing as more of a self- service application that lets customers hunt for fresh insights on their own. It’s part of a mission to make the technology widely available to businesses, governments, and other organizations, allowing anyone to interrogate the planet.