Climate change is already strongly changing our environment and the global food security is beginning to falter. With their space-borne services Kuva Space helps farmers in precision farming as well as bioasset owners, businesses and governments get better insight for making effective decisions towards sustainable farming, carbon binding and reduction of climate effects. Today, the company announced a €4.2M round of seed funding from deep tech VC fund Voima Ventures and Nordic FoodTech VC, together with the ESA InCubed programme and VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland.
The world is up for massive challenges with the still-growing population and climate change. To feed all 10 billion people in 2050, we need to produce over 50% more food than currently without increasing agricultural land area all while reversing the climate change and reducing carbon emissions.
Keeping up with the changing climate conditions is crucial for the future of our agriculture. Kuva Space (formerly known as Reaktor Space Lab) is building the world’s most effective service for global, daily and actionable real time data on ecological assets. The company aims to be the global source for actionable green data™ for preventing the destruction of biodiversity and ecosystems while ensuring food for mankind.
Kuva Space offers solutions for agriculture globally to improve crop yields up to 30 % while simultaneously decreasing the needed inputs by 15 %. The company offers situational awareness on agricultural policies, emissions, and providing true verification tools for bioasset carbon sequestration methods.
“Kuva Space takes a leap all the way to space to solve a huge global problem on Earth. With real time and data provided by Kuva Space, forests and bioassets can be transformed into measurable and tradable carbon sinks. We are looking forward to working with this highly motivated team to improve life on Earth with hyperspectral imaging and AI”, says Inka Mero, Managing Partner of Voima Ventures.
“With our daily, global service, farmers have the opportunity to access relevant, cost-efficient information on their fields and guidelines to optimize their growing conditions and use less land to grow more crops. That means decreased environmental effects while increasing income”, says Jarkko Antila, CEO of Kuva Space.
In terms of technological advances, Kuva Space’s space-borne hyperspectral camera technology offers a never before seen efficiency combining small size and breakthrough performance. This solution enables building a constellation of tens of satellites highly costefficiently, providing affordable data even for developing countries.
“Everything in our solution is built for a purpose and that has allowed us to create a highly vertically integrated product including everything from the camera technology, algorithms and software being efficient and the best there is”, explains Antila. “So far hyperspectral data has only been available from large, scientific satellites, providing data only once a month if that. We are creating a solution capable of doing the same but daily.”
Now, Kuva Space announced €4.2 million in seed investments from Voima Ventures and Nordic FoodTech VC, together with ESA InCubed programme and VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland. This seed round empowers the building and launching the first commercial satellites and developing the service pipeline, in addition to taking forward the business development side of the company.
Kuva Space is an early-stage New Space company, located in Espoo, Finland. Our mission is to improve life on Earth through daily, space-borne hyperspectral imaging and AI. Our background is in developing and operating nanosatellites for e.g. the European Space Agency ESA with 3 satellites launched to date. Combining our experience and deep understanding of space technology, novel hyperspectral technology, and powerful AI methods, we create global-scale applications with high impact on climate and agriculture.
Nordic FoodTech VC is the first venture capital fund in the Nordics investing explicitly in the future of food. NFT.VC invests in fast-developing technologies to radically renew the food system – from the soil to the orbit and from new sources of protein to better ways of eating. Transformation of the global food system is an urgent necessity for human health, for life on the planet, and for the climate. It is also a massive opportunity for new business.
Voima Ventures is a €45M deep tech fund that invests purely in startups with deep tech and scientific backgrounds. Voima Ventures’ mission is to solve major global problems by combining science, entrepreneurship, and capital. Industry domains include bio and new materials, medical technologies and life sciences, imaging and optics, IoT and electronics, robotics, software & ICT and AI. In addition, Voima Ventures has invested in more than 30 deep tech startups, including companies like Solar Foods, Infinited Fiber Company, and Dispelix. Cornerstone investors are VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland and European Investment Fund (EIF), backed by Finnish private and institutional investors.
InCubed stands for ‘Investing in Industrial Innovation’ and is a co-funding programme run by the ESA Φ-lab. InCubed focuses on developing innovative and commercially viable products and services that exploit the value of Earth observation imagery and datasets. The programme has a very wide scope and can be used to co-fund anything from building satellites to ground applications and everything between or to develop new EO business models.