Spanish startup Xoople secures $130M to map Earth for AI

Spanish startup Xoople, founded in 2019, has raised a $130 million Series B funding round. The investment brings the company’s total capital raised to $225 million. Fabrizio Pirondini, CEO and co-founder of Xoople, declined to share the firm’s exact valuation but noted that the company has reached unicorn territory.

The funding round was led by Nazca Capital. Other investors in the round include:

• MCH Private Equity
• CDTI, a tech development fund backed by the Spanish government
• Buenavista Equity Partners
• Endeavor Catalyst

Xoople has spent seven years developing its technology stack around data collected by government spacecraft and integrating with cloud providers. The company is developing a satellite constellation to collect precise data for deep learning models. On Monday, Xoople announced a deal with U.S. space and defense contractor L3Harris Technologies to build sensors for its spacecraft. According to Pirondini, these sensors are designed to collect a stream of data that will be two orders of magnitude better than existing monitoring systems.

The startup is entering a crowded market, competing with Earth Observation (EO) players such as Vantor, Planet, BlackSky, and Airbus in Europe. For now, Xoople relies on publicly available data, such as that collected by the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-2 spacecraft. However, Xoople aims to differentiate itself by embedding its solutions directly into existing enterprise platforms.

Pirondini stated that Xoople’s business model focuses on embedding its data and solutions directly into the ecosystems of partners so they can provide those services directly to their customers.

According to Aravind Ravichandran, CEO of Earth observation sector consultancy TerraWatch Space, “They laid the distribution pipes before having their own data supply — embedding into Microsoft and Esri, the two platforms where enterprise, government and most GIS buyers already live, but neither has proprietary EO data.” Ravichandran, referring to Geographic Information System (GIS) buyers, added that Google’s head start on geospatial AI models is the benchmark Xoople will be measured against.

While it remains unclear what balance Xoople will strike between providing raw data and developing its own analysis tools, Pirondini hopes the project will ultimately build what he describes as Earth’s system of record alongside partners.

Why it matters

Xoople is attempting to become a go-to source of ground truth for enterprise by building a satellite constellation specifically for deep learning models, while differentiating itself through an enterprise-focused distribution strategy.