Satnews Daily
November 12th, 2019

Industry First ... $50M in Funding for EO to BlackSky from Intelsat


An industry first will create a strategic relationship that pairs Earth observation with a global communications infrastructure. The companies are BlackSky, provider of geospatial intelligence, satellite imaging and global monitoring services, and a $50 million senior secured loan from the global satellite communications company, Intelsat (NYSE: I). BlackSky currently has four 1-meter satellites in orbit with another four slated for launch in early 2020, and plans to have 16 satellites in its constellation by early 2021.

For this transaction, Evercore acted as a financial advisor to BlackSky and PJT Partners acted as financial advisor to Intelsat. The new capital enables BlackSky to further its existing assets and alliances to remain competitive in delivering Earth intelligence faster, with greater accuracy and more affordably. The objective is that over time, BlackSky could incorporate access to Intelsat’s global communications infrastructure, delivering first-to-know insights to customers anywhere in the world. With an established manufacturing capability, mission operations center and sales channels in place, BlackSky is in the process of expanding its constellation of smallsats that the company declares "will deliver the highest revisit rate in the industry."

The company is also leading the industry in fusing AI/ML-powered computer vision, high revisit rate imagery from orbital assets and open-source intelligence to provide customers with comprehensive, deep insights about the locations in the world they care about.

Brian E. O’Toole, President and CEO of BlackSky stated that BlackSky is enabling a whole new level of global intelligence by leveraging the economics of small satellites so that their customers will always be the first to know. It takes a lot of expertise, engineering and capital to make smallsats viable; BlackSky is the first company to overcome these challenges with proven economies of scale. This latest partnership is a vote of confidence in their ability to deliver industry leading insights to their customers from one of the biggest players in the market.

Intelsat CEO Stephen Spengler offered that, BlackSky is well positioned to be a significant player in the expanding Earth observation sector, which they believe benefits from accelerating trends including cloud computing, change detection, predictive analytics and machine learning. They believe a significant number of commercial and government sector customers will increasingly rely on geospatial intelligence. Their investment will be used to fund enhancements to the current BlackSky infrastructure and will serve as a springboard for a commercial alliance with Intelsat and their Intelsat General government subsidiary.

 


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