Harnessing the Power of 40 Satellites: Spire Launches New Maritime Analytics Products

SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 29, 2017 -- Today, Spire Global Inc. announces two new machine learning and analytics products backed by data from the world’s largest constellation of ship-tracking satellites. Both products make finding vessels and information about them easier and faster by utilizing Spire’s easily accessible analytics API.  

In the past, companies looking to ingest ship-tracking data would have to sift through millions of database entries each day to find ships of interest for making crucial business decisions. Spire radically changes this.  Spire Sense Vessels utilizes analytics to find the latest information about any of over 300 thousand ships in the ocean using a single request to the company's API. Building on that, Spire’s new Predict product adds a layer of machine learning that predicts vessel positions into the future, allowing companies to “skate where the puck is headed”.

These new products are enabled by a dramatic increase in the amount and quality of maritime data captured by Spire’s ever-improving space based infrastructure and terrestrial data intelligence. New satellites, on-orbit software upgrades, and new ground stations are the main contributors to the transformation. “Our satellites now collect data from over 75 thousand unique ships each day, they’re tracked in a database of over 300 thousand ships that we keep tabs on, and we can predict where ships are going based on their past and present behavior,” said CEO Peter Platzer. “This is the successful accomplishment of our mission to provide our customers with More Ships, More Often, More Intelligently.”

The increase in data is critical to customers. Kyle Brazil, Sense’s product manager, added that “Our customers have a diverse set of needs, but almost all of them can be served by more and better data served with high reliability. With many competitors’ aging satellite infrastructure increasingly failing, our strategy of launching a constantly upgraded constellation is proving to be a superior approach.” Rather than launching just a few high-cost satellites, Spire launches many constantly upgraded small satellites which makes any impact on system performance negligible should a satellite experience problems.

With 40 satellites in orbit and a combined terrestrial feed, Spire now provides the most complete global coverage of any maritime data supplier. Its advanced analytics capabilities sift through 100s of millions of data points to provide simple answers to complex queries through an easy-to-use API. Improvements on these analytics will continue throughout 2017 and 2018, driven by more launches, ground stations, software upgrades, and advancements in machine learning.

About Spire

Spire Global Inc. is a space to cloud data analytics company that utilizes proprietary satellite data and algorithms to provide the most advanced maritime, aviation, and weather tracking in the world. Spire’s data analytics is backed by a wholly owned and developed constellation of nanosatellites, global ground station network, and 24/7 operations that provide real-time global coverage of every point on Earth over 100 times per day. To learn more, visit: www.spire.com

Release contact:
Nick Allain
+1-628-221-5333
[email protected]

Spire Global, Inc.
Ste. 150
575 Florida St
San Francisco, CA 94110