[SatNews] BlackSky Global, a satellite imaging-as-a-service company, announced today that it has tapped software and services veteran Rakesh Narasimhan as its executive vice president and general manager to lead engineering, sales, marketing and operations for its web scale satellite imagery data platform, effective immediately.
Rakesh Narasimhan
“Rakesh brings a stellar track record of building software teams, products and businesses and is ideally suited to lead our team and build that platform,” said Jason Andrews, CEO of Spaceflight Industries, the parent company to BlackSky Global. “Our vision is to revolutionize how we look at and understand our planet. With that vision, we are building a web scale e-commerce and big data platform to allow anyone on Earth to task our satellite constellation and receive an image in a matter of minutes, instead of the days and weeks it currently takes. This is a really hard problem which has a huge benefit for humanity and Rakesh will be instrumental in driving this initiative.”
Rakesh has held a range of executive leadership positions at Microsoft’s Azure as well as Server and Tools businesses. Most recently Rakesh, as group vice president and general manager at CITRIX, oversaw the development and introduction of Citrix Desktop & App Workspace Cloud Services in addition to growing an Enterprise software portfolio exceeding $1.5B.
“We are thrilled to have Rakesh join our team,” said Will Porteous, general partner of RRE Ventures. “He has a wealth of domain expertise and has worked at both large and startup organizations. He’s the right guy to lead the satellite imagery platform team.”
Narasimhan’s addition to BlackSky Global follows its June announcement to provide high-resolution images of the globe at an unparalleled cost and frequency. The company also announced key partnerships with commercial imagery intelligence provider AllSource Analysis and information technologies provider Hexagon Geospatial in June.
“The personal computer, Internet and mobile devices have re-imagined prevailing architectures to dramatically accelerate a whole industry of innovations due to their introduction. Satellites are about to go through a similar transformation and BlackSky is squarely in the middle of democratizing access to satellite imagery,” Narasimhan said. “I am proud to join a company that’s not only a leader in its field but is also passionate about pursuing the audacious goal of helping us all better understand our planet.”
BlackSky Global is planning the largest fleet of imaging satellites ever deployed to capture images of the planet in near real-time, reducing the time it takes to receive a satellite image to a couple of hours, rather than days or weeks.