Astræa and Umbra Form New Partnership to Transform Risk Mitigation with SAR Data

Charlottesville, 30 May 2023: Astraea, Inc., the platform for spatiotemporal data and analytics, has significantly advanced their risk mitigation solutions by announcing a new partnership with Umbra, a next-generation intelligence company specializing in Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data and delivery.  

Astraea is a benefit corporation focused on addressing the world’s most pressing problems including climate change with their platform. Umbra’s SAR data is weather independent and so it's a great dataset for combating changing climate risks. As seeing through smoke from wildfires and penetrating through the clouds of hurricanes and floods becomes increasingly important for risk mitigation, the addition of Umbra SAR data on the Astraea platform unlocks new use cases for early damage detection, historical flood analysis, and disaster monitoring applications.  

By offering a single solution and access to the world's best image providers with a flexible pay-per-use pricing model as well as an intuitive platform that fosters collaboration, Astræa makes commercial satellite images and the insights derived from them more accessible. With Astraea’s platform, users can collaborate across teams by creating comments and notes on projects and sharing them with an entire organization or team, which is especially important for SAR data use cases where it takes a bit more time and skill to discern or detect anomalies, whether through visual inspection or analytics. Furthermore, Astraea customers can pair environmental information from Umbra’s SAR data, such as historical flood analysis, with customizable economic overlays into their decision-making processes and risk mitigation plans for a more robust solution. Today, Umbra’s open data archive is available with Astræa as well as their imagery tasking services.  

CEO at Astræa, Daniel Bailey comments, “We are thrilled to announce our partnership with Umbra, combining our expertise in spatiotemporal analytics and deriving insights from imagery with their cutting-edge SAR data and tasking capabilities.”  

Astræa is consistently bringing on new data partners, such as non-EO datasets, to offer customers exclusive, low-latency data sources on industry-leading financial terms. Due to Astræa’s express purpose to supply data in a uniform and standardized format across many imagery providers, like Umbra, customers won't have to worry about maintaining multiple data contracts, APIs, and data formats.    

Enterprises will soon be able to receive rapid spatiotemporal insights after ordering Umbra imagery with Astræa. This is made possible by on-the-fly notes and comments on imagery across space and time, which can be easily shared among teams to create a unified view of the on-the-ground conditions. 

“Together, we are moving towards unparalleled risk monitoring and asset monitoring solutions, especially for energy, financial services, and real estate industries. We believe this partnership will revolutionize the way these industries operate and pave the way for more effective and sustainable practices. This partnership represents a significant step forward in our mission to leverage innovative technology for the benefit of our clients and the planet,” says Daniel Bailey. 

Bailey continues, “When we consider the areas in these industries where there is little to no existing space strategy, we can see that what makes a difference is combining an easy and collaborative platform like Astraea with unparalleled on-demand data like that from Umbra.” 

Umbra, based in Santa Barbara, California, has six satellites in orbit. According to Umbra, they are licensed to operate up to 32 satellites and are launching their next two satellites later this year. As the SAR company grows and launches new payloads, the solutions needed to analyze this data will need to scale as well. The Astræa-Umbra partnership is set up to support this in that the Astræa platform enables personalized dashboards that are designed to gather data at scale and over time, unique analytics to determine the proper solutions, and frictionless integrations. 

“Umbra is well-positioned to benefit from rising demand for high-resolution SAR as partners like Astraea start to apply it to new industries and use cases. It takes more than just a few pretty pictures for executives to realize how space-based data might affect corporate strategy, which is why we need analytics and solutions partners. Astraea is able to evaluate change at scale with free, publicly available data and then hone in on critical assets with our high-resolution imagery, all inside a world-class software platform that meets customers where they are today instead of asking them to become experts on SAR,” comments Joe Morrison, VP of Commercial Experience at Umbra. 

In the future, Umbra plans to add radio frequency (RF) sensing to its product offering, a capability typically reserved for the defense and intelligence markets. “We see a lot of opportunity for analytics partners to combine multiple sources of data, like RF and SAR together, to unlock new use cases in the private sector. From a customer’s perspective, those are the products that start to look like magic,” Morrison says.  

Elizabeth Duffy, Principal Product Marketing Manager, Astræa eduffy@astraea.io  

Astræa provides a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform that leverages geospatial data from more than 1,000 satellites to address some of the most pressing challenges we face today. Using artificial intelligence, machine learning, and cloud computing technologies, the Astræa platform enables customers to access and operationalize spatiotemporal insights across multiple industries, including clean energy, agriculture, conservation, carbon finance, and real estate.

Astræa was founded in 2016 as a for-profit Benefit Corporation located in Charlottesville, Virginia. Astræa's cloud-native platform provides the tools and infrastructure required to build production-level analytics on satellite, aerial, and drone imagery. By eliminating the common barriers to processing this valuable resource, Astræa enables individuals & organizations to access, analyze, and unlock actionable insights from petabytes of Earth-observing data at a fraction of the cost and complexity previously required. 

Astræa: See the Earth as it could be.  

To learn more, visit: https://astraea.earth/  

Headquartered in Santa Barbara, Umbra is a technology company launching a constellation of next-generation microsatellites that can generate high-resolution images day and night, regardless of weather conditions, for timely delivery to customers through our direct tasking platform Canopy. We empower customers by offering them access to high-quality, affordable data to help solve the complex business and security challenges of today and the future. For more information, visit https://umbra.space.