Participated · Series A · Nov 2023

Blackshark.ai created a digital twin of Earth and sells tools that let users interpret and act on orbital and aerial imagery. Its new product, Orca Huntr, is a no-code, scribble-driven interface that lets users quickly build and refine object-detection models from imagery. The company was born out of the gaming industry and emphasizes a platform that digests widely varying data sources and epochs. Blackshark.ai has exclusive access to Maxar’s satellite archive, which it uses to train and contextualize models. Customers range from governments, scientists and military users to real-estate developers and industrial clients; many ask the company to verticalize the service into end-to-end solutions. The team says the model can generalize beyond orbital imagery to domains like medical or microscopic industrial imagery and is exploring OEM introductions. The company will make Orca Huntr available to paying customers on December 4, and declined to provide pricing details. Blackshark.ai is an Austrian startup that converts widely available 2D imagery into accurate, traversable 3D reconstructions using machine learning and large-scale computing. Its technology powered the fully traversable globe in Microsoft’s Flight Simulator and can extrapolate building geometry by analysing context such as neighborhood type and roof characteristics. The company has accelerated its 2D-to-3D processing from about a month of computation to roughly three days—an approximately 300x improvement. Blackshark.ai positions its product as a searchable surface of the planet for use cases including climate modeling, disaster relief, smart cities, autonomous industries, and AR/VR. With the new funding it plans to hire more engineers and researchers and to scale commercial operations by building sales, support, and other pieces required for hyperscaling. Financially, the company raised a $20 million Series A to develop and scale its replica-Earth technology.