A Charlottesville-based AI startup is positioned for growth in 2021 thanks to two recent raises totaling more than $7 million.
Astraea, Inc., co-founded in 2016 by Daniel Bailey, Matthew Eldridge, Simeon Fitch, Brendan Richardson and Dr. Kim Scott, is an AI platform whose technology is used to analyze geospatial data.
Richardson said the team's collective background in data science and software development led them to create a company focused on solving complex problems in data by leveraging the geospatial dataset.
"At the moment, there are more than 2,000 Earth-observing satellites in orbit," he said. "We built [Astraea] to leverage that data set and put data science tools in the hands of non-expert data scientists to extract and analyze it."
Earlier this week, the startup submitted filings with the SEC for two rounds of funding that totaled $7.3 million.
Richardson said the first round, a $3.7 million debt and equity raise that opened in April 2019, was a bridge round backed by the company's current network of investors, including several angel funds and the UK-based Children's Investment Fund Foundation. The raise, Richardson said, was meant to keep funding flowing for Astraea through the end of 2019, as it geared up for its first major venture-based round in early 2020.
"When Covid happened, it really slowed things down with the Venture Capital investors," he said. "Our angel investors and CIF stepped in and helped us raise the Series A in place of the VCs."
That round, also a debt and equity round, totaled $3.6 million. Richardson said the funds will be used to continue building Astraea's team and scale the platform.
"We released the platform commercially at the end of 2019, around the time of our bridge financing, and this year has been about showing customers what's possible," he said. "In 2021, we'll be focused on taking customer interest and figuring out where the commonalities are."
He added, "As Covid hit, every business was transformed overnight, and companies that never thought about remote sensing starting coming to us to begin helping them figure out how to do it effectively. It's greatly expanded our pipeline."