Registration is now open for ESA’s first-ever Earth Observation Commercialisation Forum. Taking place at ESA Headquarters in Paris from 30 to 31 October 2023, investors, institutions, entrepreneurs and companies of any size from the Earth observation sector will now be able to come together and discuss the commercial potential and challenges of Earth observation, together with the technical, industrial and risk-capital support available to European companies.
Advancing commercial space in Europe is a vital component of ESA Agenda 2025 and the Earth observation sector has an abundance of possibilities that private businesses can capitalise on, from satellites and ground infrastructure through to applications that solve real-world problems with data from space. ESA’s Earth Observation Programme Directorate is organising the first Earth Observation Commercialisation Forum to bring leading stakeholders of the fast-growing Earth observation commercial space sector under the same roof.
After confirming their support to ESA InCubed at the 2022 Ministerial Council, Portugal and ESA are announcing a new call for co-funding innovative Earth observation (EO) business cases.
With its mission to support commercially successful business activities in the Earth observation sector, the ESA InCubed programme has a fundamental role to play in promoting growth and competitiveness in the space economies of its Participating States. Portugal is a well-established subscriber to InCubed, and has recently confirmed its intention to open a new call for applying for InCubed co-funding.
Portuguese entities can now submit ideas, which will then be assessed by InCubed and the Portuguese Delegation. Activities selected will need to meet the needs of the Portuguese National Space Strategy, demonstrate a credible return on investment for the company and provide a balance of subject areas and geographical locations within Portugal.
Proposals can be submitted at any time, with two evaluation periods per year. In 2023, the first evaluation is scheduled for early July and the second for Quarter 4. Further details can be found on the Portuguese Space Agency website, and an online webinar to explain InCubed opportunities in Portugal will take place on 23 May at 11:00 CEST. Applicants for InCubed support from any participating state should submit their proposals on ideas.esa.int.
“This initiative from Portugal amply demonstrates the broad commitment to InCubed,” commented Head of the Φ-lab Invest Office Michele Castorina. “We will continue to work hand in hand with our participating states to increase access to finance for the European EO sector, and I look forward to seeing a host of new proposals from Portuguese enterprises.”
Carolina Sá is the Earth Observation officer at the Portuguese Space Agency: “Earth Observation and all its potentialities are a central component of Portugal’s National Strategy for Space. The Portuguese Space Agency believes that this funding opportunity for innovative products and services will give a fundamental boost to our national Earth Observation ecosystem.”
The latest ESA InCubed call for the United Kingdom is now out. UK entities are invited to submit proposals seeking to develop innovative and commercially viable products and services that exploit the value of Earth observation. The deadline for submissions is 31 May.
The ESA InCubed programme focuses on co-funding commercial development activities across the entire Earth observation (EO) value chain, including satellites, ground applications, downstream applications and new EO business models. InCubed works in very close cooperation with its participating Member States and periodically issues dedicated country-oriented calls.
The most recent national call has been released in collaboration with the UK Space Agency and is open to UK industry and academia. A total of £1 400 000 of funding has been made available, with no upper or lower limit for individual activities. Idea pitches and proposals will be jointly assessed by InCubed and the UK Space Agency, based on criteria such as financial return for the British space sector, level of innovation and wider environmental, social or economic benefits.
Selected activities must finish within 18 months of starting and be able to demonstrate market readiness at completion.
There will be a webinar on 24 April to guide entities on the application process and answer questions relating to the call. Requests to join the event can be sent by completing the online form.
Details of the call can be found here. Applicants should submit their proposals on ideas.esa.int, and the closing date for entries is 31 May 2023.
A new video provides a chance to meet researchers and business innovators from ESA Φ-lab and get an overview of their stimulating working environment.
The work of ESA Φ-lab covers a remarkably wide scope in both Earth observation (EO) research and support to the commercialisation of EO products and services. In this brief but informative video, Φ-lab members from both the Explore and Invest offices talk about some of the fascinating activities they are involved in, embracing topics such as dengue outbreak risk assessment, embedded artificial intelligence on satellites and collaborating with EO start-ups.
Φ-lab is always looking for new recruits, so if you are interested in pushing the boundaries in leading-edge EO research, please get in touch.
Support from ESA’s Earth observation InCubed commercialisation programme has enabled two companies, GeoVille and EOX, to secure a major contract to provide an Austrian Area Monitoring Service. The consortium’s EO-WIDGET software provides the farming sector with critical satellite-derived information and is a key tool in compliance monitoring for the European Common Agricultural Policy.
Agricultural monitoring has gained ever-increasing attention recently in the face of a major global food crisis and growing concerns over food security. Within Europe, the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is a fundamental pillar of the continent’s food supply. The CAP now requires national governments to carry out increasingly extensive checks and controls of agricultural production and payment claims from farmers.
At the recent 2022 ESA Council at Ministerial Level, Member States affirmed the success of InCubed by renewing the programme with a 65% budget boost. InCubed’s new, wider remit encompasses a host of actions designed to further stimulate and accelerate European innovation and competitiveness in commercial Earth observation.
The ESA Council is the governing body that provides the policy guidelines within which the Agency develops the European space programme. The Council meets periodically at ministerial level, and at the last meeting, the 2022 ESA Council at Ministerial Level (CM22), Member States gave a ringing endorsement of ESA’s work, with an exceptional 17% subscription increase compared with CM19. This equates to a total of €17 billion, of which 16% is destined for the Earth Observation Programme (EOP) for continuing and developing its efforts in facing the global challenges of 2023 to 2026 and beyond and ensuring European strategic autonomy.
As an ESA Earth observation commercialisation initiative, InCubed is an optional programme for Member States and so is heavily dependent on the outcome of Ministerial Council meetings. For CM22, the Φ-lab Invest office submitted proposals for expanding the scope and reach of InCubed, leading to the successful allocation of additional funds amounting to €176 million overall programme size. Two new countries, Slovenia and Hungary, also joined, bringing the InCubed family to a total of 21 participating states.
Dubbed InCubed-2, the latest incarnation of the programme comprises a suite of enhancements termed ‘Invest Actions’. These have been added as a result of lessons learnt during previous InCubed phases and are intended to create a framework of partnerships and collaborations that will strengthen the InCubed offer and further support the evolution of the commercial Earth observation (EO) sector. Examples of planned activities include research on promising EO markets, awareness campaigns, creating InCubed ambassadors, start-up coaching, InCubed Business Innovation Factories, and a new, faster route for rapidly delivering proofs of concept using emerging technologies.
“The funds granted at CM22 will further empower us in our quest to advance European commercial EO,” comments InCubed Programme Manager Michele Castorina. “InCubed strives to bring together technical capabilities and investment to enable European entrepreneurs to operate in the global EO domain, and the Invest Actions will help underpin this vision by reinforcing relationships with private investors, venture builders and other key stakeholders.”
One Invest Action that is already underway is thematic calls. Conceived as competitive initiatives aimed at selecting and coaching promising companies, thematic calls are based on current societal issues that may benefit from EO technologies and data. The first call, covering the topic of Cultural and Natural Heritage, was launched recently and will be followed by further such competitions in the future.
Other InCubed events and campaigns are also on the way this year, including EO Commercialisation Days in May. This forum for entrepreneurs, investors, institutions and established companies will provide an ideal platform for commercial collaboration. Details of the event will be published shortly.
ESA has signed a letter of intent with Slovenian company Sinergise Ltd to foster Earth observation (EO) entrepreneurship and encourage the development of EO commercial solutions. The collaboration will target companies supported by ESA Φ-lab, the InCubed EO commercialisation programme, ESA’s Business Incubation Centres (ESA BICs) and ESA Technology Brokers.
Sinergise Ltd has extensive expertise in developing advanced geospatial information systems (GISs) based on cloud and web technologies. Established in 2008, the company focuses on high-impact fields such as Earth observation, making it easy for individuals, institutions and companies to retrieve actionable insights.
The intended partnership on Earth observation commercialisation with ESA is aimed at joint efforts between the two entities for bolstering the development of an active and vibrant EO commercial ecosystem, strengthening the usage of innovative technologies and raising awareness of EO-based services. The collaboration is particularly focused on enhancing the business cases of companies that are or have been supported through Φ-lab or the InCubed EO commercialisation programme, ESA BIC or ESA Technology Broker activities.
One of the key actions for accelerating entrepreneurship will be a free one-year enterprise-level subscription for Sinergise’s Sentinel Hub, an award-winning satellite imagery archiving, processing and distribution service. Located either in a cloud-based GIS or within the client environment, Sentinel Hub provides easy access to satellite data from missions such as Sentinel, Landsat, Planet, Pleiades and WorldView, and can help both space and non-space players leverage a wealth of EO-powered information.
Further details on the collaboration and how to take advantage of the Sentinel Hub offer will be communicated to InCubed and other ESA Φ-lab-supported companies in the coming months, and will also be distributed via the ESA BIC and ESA Technology Broker Network.
At a ceremony today at ESA’s ESRIN establishment, German company constellr signed a contract extension to design, develop and customer-validate its HiVE solution with ESA InCubed technical and financial support. Through the development of a microsatellite with an innovative Thermal Infrared (TIR) payload, HiVE will place advanced-warning data on crop stress at the fingertips of agribusiness companies, smart-farm operators and government policy makers.
Traditional approaches to measuring crop water-stress conditions include monitoring irrigation systems, indirect measurement of field temperatures, or aerial remote sensing of temperature via drones, all of which have drawbacks. Satellite remote sensing is available, but generally relies on optical imaging of leaf colour changes, meaning that at the time of detection irreversible crop damage has probably already occurred. Thermal infrared satellite measurements, which eliminate these drawbacks, are however becoming increasingly available.
constellr GmbH, a New Space start-up with offices in Freiburg and Brussels, saw an opportunity to provide immediate monitoring of crop health through specifically created TIR Earth observation satellites. By directly measuring leaf temperature from space, changes in plant transpiration can be spotted so that farmers can take remedial action days or weeks before critical crop deterioration ensues. constellr’s HiVE (High-resolution VEgetation monitoring) system will encompass a constellation of microsatellites with miniaturised TIR sensors in combination with a global ground-station-as-a-service infrastructure and cloud-based data platform. HiVE’s toolset will give both commercial and institutional customers actionable insights on crop conditions, helping to reduce the risk of crop loss and improve yield predictions.
The HiVE development is technically supported and partially funded by the ESA InCubed programme. At the contract extension signing today, constellr CTO Marius Bierdel commented on the significance of the investment: “Supported by the technical expertise and funding of InCubed, constellr is able to expedite the development of its first commercially operational satellite. This is a critical early part of our rapid infrastructure development cycle – a major driver for our competitiveness in the market and the key to bringing us a step closer to being a successful player in the space ecosystem.”
The German National Delegation to ESA was also represented at the meeting. “HiVE is the largest investment that we have made so far within InCubed,” explained Michael Nyenhuis, InCubed Programme Coordinator at the German Space Agency at DLR. “Given the current global issues of drought and food shortages, today’s launch of this development initiative is particularly timely, and we are sure that the final product will have a decisive role in optimising future irrigation management and biomass output.”
“This is a great example of how ESA can aid private-sector advances on solutions to climate problems and support a promising business initiative relevant to the agribusiness sector,” added ESA Director of Earth Observation Programmes Simonetta Cheli. “The technical support and business advice from ESA will undoubtedly provide an essential springboard for constellr in its journey to mission readiness and ultimately the delivery of this crucially important service.”
Commercialisation is universally recognised as essential for the future prosperity of all aspects of the European space sector, and Earth observation is no exception. The ESA InCubed programme, a co-funding initiative that helps entrepreneurs bring their innovative ideas to market, has enjoyed enormous success since the launch of its first activity in 2018 and continues to make a prodigious contribution to commercial Earth observation. The InCubed portfolio includes around 60 activities, with an impressive €63 million invested so far.
At the upcoming ESA Council at Ministerial Level, Member States will have the possibility to further empower InCubed in its far-reaching efforts to foster commercial innovation. The programme proposal makes the case for a wider remit, including a set of new ‘Invest Actions’ designed to help boost the European Earth observation economy and reinforce relationships with the private investor community.
Three activities launched under co-funding from the ESA InCubed programme respond to customer needs for improved information quality and precise measurement of trends and variations by exploiting Earth observation (EO) assets. Targeted sectors include agri-food, environmental protection, mining and oil and gas.
NEO (NL): SINERGI service
Earth observation data from optical and Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) sensors provides a wealth of information for an ever-increasing number of business applications, but there is often a lack of verification of such data from other sources. Dutch company NEO is developing SINERGI, a novel service that improves reliability by combining EO-derived change detection with crowd-sourced data and publicly available information.
NEO Chief Operating Officer Jan Erik Wien explains: “SINERGI represents a major step forward in the fusion of satellite and non-space data. It uses semantic integration technologies to add validation and additional context to EO-based information services, enabling customers to make informed and data-driven decisions in their operations and helping them to meet their ESG [Environmental, Social and Governance] commitments. Typical Big Data pools feeding into SINERGI might include local government records, planning permission documents or even social media posts.”
The intended customer segments for the service vary from governing authorities in areas such as construction, forestry law enforcement and environmental inspection, to private-sector businesses like insurance companies. SINERGI has now completed its main development and is being piloted with customers in the fields of building-related information and invasive plant species in waterways.
ABACO (IT): FIbEO product
Another example of fusing EO and ground-based data is FIbEO, a product conceived by the ABACO group and aimed at the food production industry. “We recognised a gap in the market in terms of information availability for guaranteeing food quality,” says ABACO Project Manager Marco Bonfigli. “For a given crop, agricultural players need to understand current biomass status, have access to intelligent yield estimates and be able to cross-check compliance with specifications. The FIbEO platform will provide such aggregated insight through ML [Machine Learning] algorithms that draw on both satellite imagery and historical data, ultimately helping growers, consortia and control bodies to create trustworthy food supply chains.”
The first target segment for FIbEO is viniculture, with collaboration currently ongoing with growers in Italy’s Chianti region. The first release of the platform will enable wineries not only to predict output but also to identify dead vines in the field in near-real time.
TRE Altamira (IT): BulletInSAR service
Turning once again to the topic of change detection through SAR sensing, Copernicus Sentinel-1 and other radar imaging constellations enable mm-accurate displacements of the Earth’s surface to be measured from space, providing invaluable information to operators in sectors such as mining, energy, civil engineering and civil protection agencies. TRE Altamira already provides customers with remote sensing ground-deformation information on their assets of interest, but the satellite data stream currently requires significant human processing in order to produce actionable end-user reports.
Feedback from TRE Altamira’s clients identified the requirement for faster response times, greater capacity for monitoring multiple assets and supplementary details on measurement reliability. BulletInSAR is the company’s solution, a tool that will deliver timely, scalable deformation reports by adopting an ML-based unsupervised process to cut out the human bottleneck.
Alessandro Ferretti is the company’s CEO: “Innovation and pushing the technology envelope have always been key elements of TRE Altamira’s identity, and BulletInSAR is no exception. As development gets underway, we’re really pitching for a superior user experience, a solution that will deliver fully automated reports using a cloud-hosted interface with tailored results screening. Co-funding from InCubed is of course a powerful enabler for TRE Altamira, helping to propel us forward as we take market-driven SAR ground-displacement reporting to the next level.”
ESA InCubed Officer Piera di Vito continues the theme: “All three of these activities are a perfect fit for InCubed’s DNA: supporting innovative ideas that spot a commercial need for AI-driven, EO-sourced data and insight. We are proud to see and help sustain such a competitive and dynamic ecosystem in the Earth observation domain, and the fact that SINERGI, FIbEO and BulletInSAR are at different stages in their development amply demonstrates the end-to-end nurturing that InCubed provides, from concept through to market readiness.”
