AtLightspeed, we really care about partnering with generational businesses. Generational businesses need founders that think not 5 or 10 years, but 20 or 30 years ahead. Founders who will spend their lives fixing global-scale problems within their industries. Founders we simply cannot see doing anything else. Ever. Meeting these founders can be as exciting as it can be nerve-wracking — the way you feel when you are in the presence of greatness. We felt that when we met Awais and Kshitij of Pixxel.
Our path to investing in Pixxel was not as linear as we would have liked. We met the team in Jan 2020. Even though they were recent college grads, Awais and Kshitij had already spent years embedded in the space industry. We left that meeting somewhat in awe of their business savvy and their understanding of space and satellite tech. It didn’t take us long to decide to invest but, by then, Pixxel’s seed round was already over-subscribed by 2x. Over the next three months, we kept in close touch and in March, when COVID-19 hit, Pixxel called us. They had decided to raise additional capital to ride through the pandemic. Finally, we were in business.
So, what is Pixxel?
Pixxel is building the world’s most advanced constellation of low-earth orbit imaging small satellites to provide an entirely new kind of hi-res dataset (hyperspectral) that today’s satellites aren’t capable of. The planned constellation of satellites will provide global coverage every 24 hours enabling organizations around the globe to detect, monitor and predict global phenomena in near real time. Besides access to data at very low latency, Pixxel will also provide to customers a turnkey platform for building, deploying, and maintaining industry-specific image processing and machine learning models at scale.
Current earth observation satellites capture primarily RGB (visible light) data & to an extent multi-spectral data at low- to mid-resolution. Customers now want (a) higher (<10 meter) resolution (b) daily data refreshes and (c) more data that capture more info e.g. soil or crop quality. Pixxel’s low-cost, high-resolution hyperspectral cameras will be able to provide analytics ready data at a scale the market has never seen. The Pixxel data will service existing use-cases in earth observation but our hyperspectral content will open an entirely new sets of applications across Climate Change, Agri, ESG, Defense and commodities at a global scale.
Pixxel’s will make capturing hyperspectral data as simple for customers as scheduling an Uber and satellite imagery as ubiquitous as GPS is to our lives.
Our investment thesis in Pixxel is based on three primary pillars. First and foremost, we gravitate towards world class teams that are early to inevitable trends. Pixxel team is one of the strongest in space tech at seed stage anywhere in the world. The team of 35 has already attracted folks from leading space and aerospace organizations such as Planet Labs, Raytheon, ISRO (Indian Space Research Organization) and DRDO (Defense Research & Development Organization).
Second, the satellite imaging data and data-services market is large and expected to be ~$8B by 2025. Hyperspectral is an emerging segment within earth observation and is expected to further expand the market to $15-20B in the next 10 years. Pixxel is an early mover in this segment. There are only ~25 hyperspectral satellites in orbit today — majority of them launched by China — mostly launched by government agencies. In comparison, there are 400–450 satellites in orbit for RGB imagery. Pixxel’s satellites are 10x cheaper to manufacture and launch, capture 50x more data than RGB, and are 3–5x better than currently available hyperspectral resolutions.
And finally, Pixxel is positioned in the most superior segment of the space economy: full-stack constellation players that own the satellite, the payload, and the data. The hardest and the most important part of space tech is sending things into space and then keeping them there. Pure earth-based data analytics players haven’t solved for this and are getting disintermediated because they do not have control/ownership of the data. Constellation plays such as Pixxel or Planet Labs are far more strategic as they own the data and can control downstream pricing as well as analytics over time.
It is therefore no surprise that Pixxel has generated a huge amount of customer interest from large categories — each of which represent multi $B of TAM — such as Agri, Defense, Oil & Gas and Climate/ESG. Our bookings has expanded rapidly in just a few months to several tens of millions of dollars. Not only that, we have onboarded an amazing set of partners, advisors and investors to the company as part of their recent series A.
Per Aspera, Ad Astra
Hard tech is hard. It takes years of building and persevering with your heads down. We loved the Pixxel team from the get go, but came to truly appreciate the fierceness of their ambition and their warrior spirit over the next 1.5 years. We meet entrepreneurs every day in our line of work, but once in a while we come across an entrepreneur who is just born to risk it all; an entrepreneur who wants to not just build a kingdom, but build a kingdom at the edge of a precipice. In the Pixxel team, we found our Icarus perched at the edge of this precipice: prepared to fall but destined to fly. We are proud, humbled, & excited to be a small part of what promises to be a flight of a lifetime.
Per Aspera, Ad Astra — through hardships, to the stars.
— Hemant Mohapatra & Shreyans Chopra
About Lightspeed: Lightspeed is a multi-stage venture capital firm focused on accelerating disruptive innovations and trends in the Enterprise, Consumer, and Health sectors. Since 2000, Lightspeed has backed entrepreneurs and helped build companies of tomorrow, including Snap, Affirm, AppDynamics, OYO, Nutanix, Byju’s, and Udaan. Lightspeed and its affiliates currently manage more than $10 Billion across the global Lightspeed platform, with investment professionals and advisors in India, Silicon Valley, Israel, China, Southeast Asia and Europe.
Authors
