Near Space Labs designs and operates Swift robots—aircraft lifted by helium balloons that use wind currents to take high‑resolution (7cm) images from the stratosphere and glide back to earth. The company sells subscription imagery products largely to insurance customers for disaster response and risk assessment, and it is pursuing agricultural customers next. Near Space claims its approach can capture in hours what would take 800,000 drones days or weeks, and requires no special flight licenses because the systems are balloon‑powered and unmanned. Management says scaling coverage is straightforward and its ambition is to cover 80% of the U.S. population twice a year with 7cm imagery. The founders and leadership have technical backgrounds in space and physics, and the company is run out of the U.S. Near Space Labs builds and operates Swifty — small autonomous, wind-powered robots attached to weather balloons that reach 60,000–85,000 feet and capture 400–1,000 square kilometers of imagery per flight. The company positions Swifty as an alternative to satellites, claiming resolutions up to 50× better than satellite imagery and offering persistent, near-real-time coverage of rapidly changing urban areas. Devices are manufactured in a Brooklyn workshop while hardware R&D and engineering leadership are based in Barcelona; launches are coordinated with the FAA and air traffic control. As of the article, Near Space has eight Swifties in operation and has logged more than 540 flights through 2022; it sells non-exclusive data via a subscription API. Founded in 2017, the company is headquartered in Brooklyn and Barcelona, Spain. Near Space plans to use new funding to expand its geographical footprint and hire additional staff to scale operations.

Total raised

$33M

Funding rounds

2

Latest round

Series B

Latest activity

Apr 2025