Participated · Seed · May 2025

Persona AI develops bipedal humanoid robots designed to perform welding and other skilled trades in heavy manufacturing, with an initial focus on shipbuilding. The company has iterated three hardware generations in 24 months, performed its first untethered weld in a Houston shop, and demonstrated outdoor walking in protective materials. Persona AI has units already at HD Hyundai and plans prototype delivery by the end of 2026 with commercialization in 2027. It plans to offer robots via a robotics-as-a-service (RaaS) model to reduce customer capital expenditure and enable large-scale fleet deployments. The founding team includes veterans from NASA and prior humanoid efforts, and the company targets markets with acute labor shortages and repetitive, high-value welding work.

Participated · Series D · Nov 2019

Orbital Insight offers TerraScope, a self-serve multi-sensor geospatial analytics platform that blends computer vision and geolocation sensor data to detect changes, monitor activity, and discover patterns of life globally. TerraScope, released in Q4 2022, evolved from the company’s GO Platform and adds easier multi-sensor data fusion, a library of pre-defined analyses for single-click insights, and massive scalability for millions of areas of interest. Since the TerraScope launch, the company has secured clients across Energy, Industrial Materials, and Information Services in North America, and Semiconductors, Telecommunications, and Financial Services across Asia. Orbital Insight is targeting enterprise-class commercial and federal markets and is using the new financing to support TerraScope marketing to additional customers. The company highlights strong customer demand for TerraScope and continued investor interest tied to recent contract wins. Orbital Insight builds geospatial analytics software that uses AI and computer vision to analyze petabytes of multi-source data, including satellite and synthetic aperture radar imagery, location intelligence, and AIS vessel-traffic data. Its core product, Orbital Insight GO, is a software solution the company plans to expand and further develop with the new funding. The platform supports use cases such as supply chain monitoring, real estate analysis, infrastructure mapping, and defense and intelligence. Customers include financial services firms, Global 2000 companies, several U.S. government agencies, and global non-profit organizations. Led by CEO and founder Dr. James Crawford and based in Palo Alto, the company has positioned its product for both commercial and government applications. Financially, the company has now secured over $125 million in total funding. Orbital Insight builds analytics products that analyze satellite imagery and other data using deep learning to deliver business insights. Its offerings have been used to infer revenue signals—for example, counting cars in retailer parking lots as a proxy ahead of earnings. The company reports strong commercial uptake as well as government interest, and investors cited hiring for engineering and sales. As satellite imagery and enabling technology commoditize, Orbital Insight and peers are racing to serve new markets and simplify offerings. The firm has become one of the most capitalized startups in the geospatial analytics space. Total fundraising now stands at $78.7 million following the latest round. Orbital Insight builds self-teaching algorithms to analyze satellite and UAV imagery, counting and measuring roads, airplanes, clouds, lakes, buildings, oil tanks and more. Its platform produces analytics such as parking‑lot vehicle counts (it says it has counted more than a billion cars across one million lots for 50 US retailers). The 30-person company works with more than 60 asset management firms, several U.S. government agencies, and two global non-profits, ingesting imagery from providers including DigitalGlobe, Airbus, NASA Landsat and Planet Labs. Orbital has partnered with the World Bank to improve poverty estimates using building height and rooftop materials as wealth proxies. The company plans to expand sales and engineering headcount and establish or grow presences in Washington, New York, and later London and Hong Kong, and expects to enter verticals such as financial services, insurance, energy, NGOs and real estate while adding drone and IoT geospatial data sources. Orbital Insight builds data products that extract insights from satellite images for decision makers across industries. The company uses image processing, neural networks, machine learning and statistical analysis to forecast outcomes and detect trends. Its customers include hedge funds, real estate developers, insurance companies, government agencies, and international development and environmental non-profits. Developed products include end-of-season crop harvest forecasts from mid-season spectral analysis, quarterly retail performance estimates from parking‑lot counts, measures of construction activity in China, and early estimates of global crude oil inventory fluctuations. The company raised an $8.7M Series A and plans to use the funds to hire engineers and build out new data product lines. Orbital Insight is led by founder Dr. James Crawford and is hiring.