Orlando-based Nuview — which intends to build the world's first commercial lidar (light detection and ranging) satellite constellation so it can 3D map the Earth's entire land surface and produce endless geospatial data — has been busy plotting out its future. It has attracted $15 million in investments and also plans to open a new headquarters in Lake Nona and add local jobs.
Nuview in May secured a U.S. Department of Defense contract for $2.75 million through a program called National Security Innovation Capital. The DoD launched the program in 2021 "to support startups developing hardware technologies critical to national defense and economic competitiveness, while stimulating additional funding from the private sector and blocking future investment from untrusted sources," said Director Tex Schenkkan in a prepared statement.
Meanwhile, the rest of the funding has come from MaC Venture Capital, Broom Ventures, Cortado Ventures, Florida Funders, Industrious, Liquid2, Veto Capital and the celebrity Leonardo DiCaprio over the past year.
Why this matters: Nuview’s global data services operate out of southeast Orlando's Lake Nona community, where its number of local employees will grow once its headquarters is fully established. The firm said it is hiring for more than 80 positions over the next few years, with most of those jobs in Lake Nona. Details about precisely where the headquarters will be in Lake Nona have not been announced.
A satellite constellation is exactly what it sounds like: an orderly cluster of satellites. As for the usefulness of the data harvested by those satellites, it is applied across industries, from agriculture and forestry to insurance and transportation — for a variety of purposes. The premise for this costly and complicated endeavor is that better decision-making can result when more and better information is available.
Here, CEO Clint Graumann told Orlando Inno why Nuview has implications across industries, why the Department of Defense took an interest and more:
What is the value in 3D mapping the Earth’s surface?
If you were using our data for forestry, you'd be able to see the tops of trees and you'd be able to see the ground beneath the trees. Most satellites can't do that. You can see the top or the bottom, but not both. But when you can see both, it helps you understand how big that tree is as far as height and volume and you can start to understand how much carbon is present there. From a climate perspective, if we need to [reduce] carbon in the environment, this is a way that we can understand very precisely what's there. If there have been illegal logging activities in the Amazon, for example, we'll be able to see things that other satellite imagery providers can't easily see.
Is this whole thing your idea?
Yes. I've worked in Earth observation for about 15 years. Within Earth observation is the niche of the market that we describe as satellites taking images of the Earth. I've done work in what's called optical imagery, like what you see on Google Earth. I've done work in radar imagery. There’s also thermal imagery and hyperspectral imagery. During that time I kept hearing from customers, ‘We need more lidar data to be foundational to all the other data that we're working on.’
How did the U.S. Department of Defense learn about your work?
We knew that it's important for us to make sure our partners and government stakeholders are aware of what we're building because there's an entire licensing process around putting satellites into space. The news spread through that network of people that we were working with as we were helping them understand what we're building and why it's important for government and into climate science and environmental purposes.
Has the $2.75 million in funding already come through?
We're already performing on the agreement, yes.
What do these activities look like day-to-day?
We're building a system that is enhancing our original design to be able to perform better from space, enhancing the size of the different components on our satellites so we can better resolve what we're seeing on the ground. We've been recruiting pretty heavily, and right now we're working on building our headquarters in Lake Nona. All of those people working remotely in Orlando and outside of Orlando are starting to migrate in this direction.
When are the first satellites going up?
It will be more than two years, but probably less than three before our first one goes up. And then we'll be launching five every 18 months after that first one. No one has ever built this before. So far all of this type of data has been collected from airplanes and drones, so only roughly 5% of the Earth has ever been mapped with lidar.
Will this be the primary activity of your company?
The only activity of our company is to build these satellites, collect the data and provide that data to different distribution partners on every continent and every vertical market. Analytics and consulting companies will pay for access to the pool of data or they can actually call us and task the satellites to image an area that's important to them. That's called an area of interest. If there's an organization that wants to understand, for example, the Amazon, we'll image that very specific area and then they'll do an assessment from that data.
How confident are you in Nuview’s future?
We are really lucky as a startup. Many companies come up with an idea and then try to find customers. It’s the opposite for us. We've heard this demand from our partners and customers in Japan, Australia, Europe and South America and everywhere we work. We started collecting all the requirements of what they're looking for to build the business.
Nuview
- Future headquarters: Lake Nona
- Hiring: 80+ high-tech jobs
- Funds raised so far: $15 million
- Website: https://nuview.space/
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