Vancouver-based Metaspectral has been selected to participate in an accelerator run in partnership with the South Australian government.
Metaspectral is participating in the Venture Catalyst Space at the University of South Australia’s (UniSA) Innovation & Collaboration Centre, in addition to six other startups.
“There is potential for our software to immediately provide value and be used for managing, distributing, and analyzing data.”
Venture Catalyst Space is a strategic partnership between UniSA and the South Australian government dedicated to supporting startup founders in the international space sector.
The program, which began in March, connects founders with a pool of industry experts and helps accelerate their commercialization journeys. Past stakeholders include NASA, the Australian Space Agency, Defence South Australia, Airbus, and the Smart SatCRC.
The program is delivered in Adelaide, which is home to the Australian Space Agency’s (ASA) headquarters. Each year, the program selects a cohort of startups that show “innovative and disruptive” work in the space industry. Members of the 2022 cohort include Grahaa Space, Up and Up and ESpy Ocean.
ASA announced in 2022 that Kanyini, the first satellite designed and constructed in South Australia, is set to launch this year. Kanyini will include a hyperspectral imaging payload. With this inclusion, Metaspectral co-founder and CTO said “there is potential for our software to immediately provide value and be used for managing, distributing, and analyzing data.”
The goal of hyperspectral imaging is to obtain a spectrum for each pixel of a scenic image, with the purpose of finding objects, identifying materials, or detecting processes. Metaspectral’s platform conducts AI-powered hyperspectral data analysis that lets users process and analyze vast amounts of such data in real-time.
“Hyperspectral imagery contains data from across the electromagnetic spectrum which, when analyzed with artificial intelligence (AI), can be used to monitor time-sensitive environmental events on Earth such as wildfires, methane leaks, and more,” said Francis Doumet, CEO and co-founder of Metaspectral.
Formerly PixelDrive, Metaspectral was co-founded in 2018 by Doumet and Migel Tessara, and was initially a cloud storage platform that compressed and optimized uploaded photos. In 2020, the startup shifted its focus to hyperspectral imaging. It has since raised $4.7 million from one funding round in 2022, according to CrunchBase.
In addition to Metaspectral, members of the 2023 Catalyst cohort include four startups from Australia, one from India, and another jointly from New Zealand and Japan. The program has featured 29 startups since its inception in 2018.