70 percent of the world’s fresh water goes into agriculture. To prevent waste and bad harvests, the space startup ConstellR wants to revolutionize food security. The mini-satellites with infrared sensors are scheduled to hit the market in 2024.
With newly developed satellites, the German space startup ConstellR wants to reduce the waste of resources and avoid crop failures. For this purpose, the company, which was founded in 2020, collected ten million euros from venture capitalists led by Lakestar and Vsquared, the Freiburg spin-off of the Fraunhofer Institute announced.
ConstellR is developing mini-satellites the size of a refrigerator and weighing 50 to 100 kilograms, which, among other things, measure the temperature of the earth’s surface. This allows conclusions to be drawn about the water requirements of agricultural land.
“70 percent of the world’s freshwater is used in agriculture,” said ConstellR co-founder and CEO Max Gulde. Of this, 60 percent is wasted because the necessary information for more efficient irrigation is missing.
In the future, a chemical fingerprint of the areas should also be created to enable more targeted fertilization. In addition, the data from the satellites could be used to predict droughts, Gulde added. Previous systems could usually only detect this when the damage to the plants had already occurred.
The project will initially start with two satellites. With two more, every point on earth will be regularly mapped in the future. The company is expected to be able to offer its services worldwide by mid-2024. The target group is primarily agricultural corporations.
Gulde estimates ConstellR’s further capital requirements at 100 to 150 million euros over the next three to four years. His company is currently growing by ten percent a month. “We expect this to accelerate.” The core technology of the satellites is the high-performance camera and the infrared sensor. Both come from Germany, apart from a few supplier parts.