Satellites over the Strait of Hormuz: space surveillance and maritime security

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0:38Hello and welcome to The Entrepreneurs on Monocle Radio, the show all about inspiring people, innovative companies and fresh ideas in global business. Maritime shipping and security has been thrust into the spotlight in recent months, particularly in one crucial region. The US-Israel war on Iran and the ensuing Strait of Hormuz crisis have disrupted global trade routes and raised serious concerns about the safety of commercial vessels. As governments and businesses alike scramble to navigate the uncertainty, the ability to detect suspicious activity quickly and accurately is becoming more important than ever.

1:17On today's programme, we're hearing about a company offering real-time monitoring across vast areas of the planet, including at sea.

1:26Jarkko Antila:We can detect all kinds of vessels, whether they are dark vessels or even stealth vessels, in the middle of vast oceanic areas, which is not being done currently at all very efficiently. This is The Entrepreneurs with me, Tom Edwards.

1:49You're listening to The Entrepreneurs. Jarko Antila is the CEO of Kuba Space, a decade-old Finnish company building a network of satellites that use advanced imaging and AI to monitor the Earth in extraordinary detail. With a mission to have more than 100 satellites in orbit by 2030, Kuba Space delivers timely intelligence to partners on everything from agriculture and climate change to safety and security. Jarkko stopped by Midori House to discuss the power of hyperspectral imaging and the race to scale satellite constellations. He began by explaining to me how it all works.

2:29Jarkko Antila:The history is quite interesting, like, where this whole thing came from. It's full of coincidences and also intentional development. But, like, what we're now doing is that we're developing a large, like, earth monitoring system based on a certain kind of a new camera technology with the idea of being able to actually monitor the earth every day actually several times a day everywhere not only somewhere every day but everywhere continuously and figure out what things are made of on the surface of the earth so that's the kind of the basic information so if you think of like taking a hyperspectral image of yourself, you could figure out what your clothes are made of, or if a dark spot in your skin is an early stage of melanoma.

3:18Jarkko Antila:So the information goes into kind of a molecular level of what things are composed of. So from that info, then you can get information on different kinds of what crops are, you know, what crops are grown, are they doing good, are Are there like some health problems, irrigation problems, fertilizing problems, but then also like camouflaged objects, decoys, what things are made of if this is an actual tank or a fake tank. So all kinds of stuff and, you know, invisible gases, methane, CO2, these kinds of things you can see with hyperspecral. And the ground laying kind of raw data that we're gathering is multi-use.

3:58Jarkko Antila:So you always need to couple that with AI, machine learning to dig out the information. So it's not really like a visual image, but it's a cube of information that you couple with AI. So we're working with both satellite and camera technology, but half of our engineering power is actually AI software development. And presumably that's because as you become successful at realizing that ambition to gather all of this real-time planetary insight from around the entire globe, it's a deluge of data and impossible to manage, you would think, Trove. Is that where we talk about the game-changing nature of AI?

4:40Is it in being able to manage and refine that data to draw out these usable insights? Is that the thing that has changed beyond recognition in the last, what, three years really only?

4:52Jarkko Antila:Yeah, the kind of like the usage of AI and how it has changed, has changed, I guess, our vision a little bit as well, but not that much. Yeah, managing a huge amount of data. Now people talk more about fusing different kinds of data sources. I mean, we are doing it as well with optical data and radar data to get the insights that the customers want. I mean, that's really what we eventually want to do. Sometimes you need other sources of data as well. But it is really, in our case, the AI is also a lot about managing the fleet, the fleet of the satellites and how we take the images. is how do we optimize it?

5:35Jarkko Antila:Because the way we have realized the camera technology is that it's kind of software controllable in orbit. So we can turn any of our satellites being like an application specific. Like, yeah, please be a methane satellite for one minute when you cross over this point. So there's this kind of continuous sort of tip and queuing, as they say in the area, going on that baseline satellites are detecting something, but they're not sure what it is. So they give commands to the next satellites who then become like dedicated, like search engine for that. And from those, we don't need to gather all the data as raw data, but we can calculate the applications in the satellite itself.

6:16Jarkko Antila:So we have a lot of calculation capacity. And especially if you think of the, you know, the oceanic areas, it doesn't make sense to record the oceans like continue because it's like approximately 100 % water. So you want to find stuff. So you can do like vessel detection in the satellite without saving and downloading all that data when you have those like capabilities built into your satellite. So to manage all these like, you know, with complexities, this sort of a logistics challenge, it's more like a logistics software really that figures out like what to do and when to optimize the best performance with least amount of like data usage.

6:58And it's funny, you mentioned your customers or clients, I don't know how you refer to them, but one can immediately think of myriad uses for this, particularly many in sort of military space, but also lots of civil deployments as well. Is there a typical Kuva Space customer? Or I guess probably not really?

7:17Jarkko Antila:Well, you know, we're still in an early phase. So I'm not sure if we can statistically say what is a typical customer. Typical customer currently is more like an enthusiastic partner as well who kind of wants to get along in an early phase has maybe more knowledge and resources to put in to work with us than then just somebody who would just you know sign up and start getting information but in the governmental side yeah obviously like the different defense organizations or like border control type of organizations they're both interested in what's happening in quite big areas on enemy activities or suspicious illegal activities, like, you know, illegal fishing.

8:00Jarkko Antila:It doesn't need to be military activities. But then on like agri-side, we have both large and small agriculture companies that are interested in crop type identification, like how much of like wheat is grown in this area, or if the soil has degraded in these areas, and like what to do with that. So multiple kinds of, but it is mostly like governmental and then kind of large businesses who are now currently our customers. We see like in the future when we start getting more and more data and more and more satellites and more and more insights, then we start approaching already like individual farmers in the long term so that they will get directly information about their fields.

8:43Jarkko Antila:But we're not there yet, but that's in a way in the long-term vision. And it's interesting because lots of businesses you know sustainability become something of a buzzword whether in a manufacturing or heavy industry whatever it is yeah but actually to really think about the planet and its sustainable or unsustainable resources having this granularity of information is absolutely critical isn't it almost regardless of sector i mean that must be very exciting in terms of your potential use cases your growth story because everybody will need to know this information yeah absolutely and that's a That's an interesting point.

9:17Jarkko Antila:When you look at the markets and the maturity of the markets, I mean, you have the defense. They have the budgets and they know what satellites are. Now they have huge needs as well. Four years ago, we didn't have defense in our strategy at all. But now it's the majority of business-related stuff that we do. And that's because of the need and kind of matching what we have. But then we have the agricultural kind of food security side and then environmental. Food security is pretty, it's quite understandable how the business works. I mean, you have insurance companies, you have agro companies, you have governmental players and, you know, trading companies as customers.

9:57Jarkko Antila:But then on the environmental side, which is probably the most important of those for humankind in the long term, the business side is quite fragmented. So it's still like governmental NGOs. So there's, you know, people talked about this voluntary carbon credit market some years ago that's going to explode into like billions and billions, but it's been pretty quiet around it. Maybe it will happen, but it's like, you know, measuring the biodiversity of forests in the world every day, seeing how it works. Sounds like valuable information and we can do it, but then who's going to pay for it? There is a global organization that would pay for this kind of information.

10:40Jarkko Antila:So that's a more difficult question. One of our public references is WWF, which is kind of a typical customer, I guess, on that side for aquatic monitoring, in that case in Indonesia. So, yeah, the environmental bit is very important in the long term. But we see that as business, it grows the slowest of these kind of three segments. Yeah, it's really interesting. It strikes me, and we've spoken to one or two of your sort of contemporaries in this or the close, similar kind of space. We're huge fans of Finland here at Monaco, of course. Why are Finland so good at doing some of these technologies?

11:19They punch well above their weight. Is it because they've got this kind of troublesome neighbor on the other side of that long land border? Why is there something in the water or in the air, perhaps, in Finland?

11:32Jarkko Antila:Well, maybe it is the water, I'm not sure. Or the ice, I'm not sure which one at this time of the year. But yeah, I mean, I think it's coming partly from how the Finnish society works. And also a little bit of, it's a little bit of coincidence as well. We put in a lot of effort in educating the people and, you know, free education and all that stuff. and we have traditionally been quite sort of engineering oriented country which sometimes good and sometimes sometimes bad we had the nokia boom and i mean nokia is still a big company but it's not any it's not any more visible for the consumers but that produced a lot of know-how and kind of international very high level top notch know-how on electronics and consumer products and and then suddenly we had a lot of people founding new companies and it had a big impact i mean the universities they were tailoring their student programs to match the needs of nokia so for example this uh radio frequency know-how which is like needed for mobile phone design that like ice eye is based on so that's we had a very strong heritage in like radio frequency design and and and so the kind of the SAR satellites coming out of that heritage but the whole kind of measurement technology and this like physics engineering know-how has somehow rooted us in a in these kind of niches that then somehow happen like like what we're doing hyperspectral imaging is not very common you know 30 years ago there was a company in Finland that started developing that to terrestrial purposes and and that has kind of fruited stuff in the research side and that the research has gone forward and then all these things have like suddenly matched so it has been a curious coincidence also of of technologies that had been developed because of this uh sort of like an engineering background that that we've had But Finland never really had a strong space ecosystem.

13:40Jarkko Antila:We used to work for like ESA and NASA projects so that we provided like an instrument to a bigger mission. But nobody had never sent out a satellite. And then one day this one assistant professor at Aalto University figured that, hey, now it's time for Finland to make their own satellite. So they made this Aalto One student satellite project. And so that was the first of its kind in Finland. And our founders and ISAI founders are coming from that project. So it also kind of rooted or enabled new entrepreneurship type in Finland in the space industry. So I don't know, it's kind of a strangely mixed for certain niche fields.

14:27And the remote sensing is really coming from the space, from that specific lab at the university.

14:33Jarkko Antila:because they were very remote sensing oriented. And then the basic technologies are coming from like a longer history in Finland. Yeah, a long, long answer to a short question. No, no, no. I just, I find it really interesting. And it's funny because we alluded at the top to your own personal background. You know, just remind us about that because you're, so you're coming more from the camera side of things, or what's your journey to this point? Yeah, so I have an engineering background originally, So everything in my career has had something to do with optical or spectroscopic measurement techniques.

15:11Jarkko Antila:So I've either been developing them, commercializing, licensing, making products, developing companies around it or something like this. But that has always been there. so i was developing or i was a team leader at a research center in finland where we started developing this hyperspecchral camera technology originally back in almost like 20 years ago and then the alter one student satellite project happened to happen at that time and we were kind of contacted by the alter university that hey would you have some ideas for like a payload for this satellite that we want to be able to do a satellite that does something but i mean it's like It's not that important what it does, but we've heard that you have some good stuff.

15:53Jarkko Antila:And then we're like, well, we have this thing that we could try. So actually, the hyperspectral camera technology that we are now using years later at Kuva Space was first introduced in ALTO-1 satellite. It was provided by my team from VTT, Technical Researcher of Finland. So that's kind of like my connection. So I met then the student people as well from like the ISAI and, you know, future KUVASpace founders. But then I spun out a company in 2014 from VTC that had nothing to do with space or imaging, but it did commercialize spectroscopic sensors. And we had Bosch Siemens and Samsung and these people as customers.

16:36Jarkko Antila:So we learned how to do like thousands of spectroscopic sensors that would show the same result. that benefits us also like years later in this company but we sold sold that come i was the ceo and main founder we sold that company in germany in 2020 and then i joined kuva space when they had just decided that yes now we will go full speed to becoming a digital service company based on hyperspectral so i brought in the the fresh startup building know-how and the camera know-how and then I have space tech educational background from way past. So that was kind of a, yeah, sort of a good match. What's the funnest as an entrepreneur, whether you're coming more from sort of in academia or in a big corporate or doing your own thing, what's the funnest bit?

17:22Is it the beginning story? Is it that startup, that kind of crazy ambition like a runaway train? Is scale-up more fun? Exits are kind of fun, maybe. I don't know. What's the best bit?

17:35Jarkko Antila:Yeah, that's a good question. When I sold my previous company, I was kind of like thinking for a while, like, should I go to a big company or should I set up something new or what? And I did end up to the fact that I do enjoy mostly when the company is still a little bit in the early phase, when you are tackling all those like sort of fundamental problems with the product and the technology and try to get to the market and get the product market fit. when you start scaling the company well the company that we sold was not that big at that point yet so it was like 30 40 people so i don't know yet how it feels to scale from uh you know to 1000 people maybe it's fun but uh but for another day well maybe we'll find out quite soon yeah i hope so well to that point mark our card for what comes next because we've talked a lot already about potential applications the the reach and the impact of this is so potentially vast as you said it could have a democratizing impact on like the control of information in global agriculture i mean that's that's really astonishing in terms of its possibility but maybe that's a little bit further down the road so tell us about how you yarka make sense of i don't know sort of short term medium term is it about picking up certain markers either or growth scale market breakthrough how do you sort of calibrate the progress of the of the business from here on yeah yeah so when we stepped onto this hyperspectral path there we had like a thousand opportunities if you think of the all the application possibilities of hyperspectral there are like a thousand of them and so we we can't do everything so so we need to start start or needed to start like picking the ones that made sense so it's this kind of a continuous selection process of what's the capability, what's the market pool, what's the market understanding, and whether the biggest value is, for example, compared to high resolution optical or, you know, synthetic aperture radar application and things like that.

19:43Jarkko Antila:Because the markets are often very unfamiliar about hyperspectral. It's very like unknown thing. So we always, you know, get compared to whoever satellite company. So we need to kind of both educate and bring the value. That was one of the reasons why we decided not to become a hyperspectral image sales company, but an insight delivery company so that we don't need to explain the hyperspectral level. We're fed up for explaining it. Yeah. I mean, when you are gathering, I mean, if you have a lot of satellites that are gathering a lot of hyperspectral raw data, then you have the biggest pool in the world for your model training as well.

20:20Jarkko Antila:So it makes sense for us to then do the training. But then we need to really select what the insights are. And this is kind of the pro. So that's why we also work with, like I probably mentioned in the beginning, sort of friendly companies that want to kind of work with us. So develop in a way those insight services sort of one by one, gathering data, running pilots, running demos, and then kind of expanding. and now the first two satellites they are still our kind of MVP satellites so they don't have like all the capabilities that our second generation satellites will have so we can do certain things with those but not like the entire portfolio that we would want to so there's a timing aspect to it that we want to be mindful as well but it's yeah it's it's it's an interesting it's an interesting process where you have the engineering and you know satellite building and manufacturing and scaling and funding and all these need to go sort of hand in hand very delicately forward but that's that's something that i need to manage indeed i feel like your final answer prompts me to go back to the beginning and maybe i should have asked you about hyper spectronomy or specific because you talked about this idea of diving into the materiality, the content of everything.

21:42To a layman's ears, what is that process? How does it manage to achieve that granularity, that level of complexity and realize it? I mean, at the risk of trying to boil down a sort of degree level of understanding into one answer. But how does it work?

21:58Jarkko Antila:Yeah, if you take like any material, basically, any clothes that you have or your skin or chair or car paint, or whatever, they absorb light at specific wavelengths depending on how they are composed of. In optical part of the spectrum, you can see the differences as typically color change. So that's one. On a normal camera, I take three colors. In hyperspectral world, you can take 100 or 150 colors from the same range. So it helps you to identify things way better than visually but if you then go to the infrared that you can't see at all actually then the the materials start absorbing way more and they leave these specific fingerprints depending on what the materials to the spectrum of light in the infrared and hyperspectral camera detects the spectrum so so you kind of have like a 3d image so you have the image normal 2d image but then there's a third dimension.

23:02Jarkko Antila:So each pixel is actually a spectrometer and produces this light spectrum. And when you have a kind of a library, so you know what silk or cotton looks like or a certain type of plastic looks like, you can do like a lab measurement or handheld measurements and build your library. Then you can compare from the measurements. So each pixel you get information on what mix of materials is in each pixel. And then you can form these kind of false color images that, hey, you know, if we search for asphalt roads or certain type of plastic material in the forest, then it's quite easy to pinpoint those out, even though they would be visually completely impossible to see, but it's revealed in the material spectrum.

23:51Jarkko Antila:And like gases, which you don't see at all, they still absorb the same way. light in the infrared with specific wavelengths. So methane looks certain, you know, they absorb certain wavelengths, CO2 absorbs another wavelength. So by analyzing this, you get the information what things are made of. That's a pretty good explanation in layman's terms. That was the challenge. What are you most excited about, Jarko? As we look forward, we talk so much about the potential. I don't know, is there a singular application or a great problem? We talk about global sustainability of agriculture you know is there a specific area where you leap out of bed with particular excitement every morning thinking we could crack this yeah the most uh like what i expect most is that that we get to kind of ramp our constellation up because we have so much kind of request and that was we are really like capacity deprived so it would be great to be able to serve everybody who wants to be served currently, but we can't.

24:54Jarkko Antila:So that's like a frustration in the morning, but it's kind of a, it's a positive problem to have. Currently, I mean, if we kind of look at the, you know, where the short term, there's lots of things that we have designed in our next generation satellites, which we will start launching at the end of this year that have to do with maritime domain awareness. So we can detect all kinds of vessels, whether they are dark vessels or even stealth vessels in the middle of vast oceanic areas, which is not being done currently at all very efficiently. So that's something that we definitely are excited to bring into the market for, you know, figuring out where those like illegal or otherwise not to be recognized ships are going.

25:38Jarkko Antila:But then like if you think of the long-term things in the future, like environment, I'm quite interested about this like global biodiversity first, the monitoring, for example. I mean, I mentioned that it's not the easiest thing to monetize at the moment, but you can imagine that we can update the tree species or plant species distribution of the world daily. Like how much would that help humankind to manage the bioassets that we have at our disposal and also the transparency so that it can be also monitored by the officials that the biodiversity is not being destroyed. So those kinds of things, I'm actually really excitedly waiting.

26:28Jarkko Antila:But unfortunately, it will still take some years for that to materialize, but not too much. I mean, in five years, we will have 100 satellites, so then we are up and running. That was Jarkko Anttila, the CEO of Kuba Space. And since we spoke, Jarkko tells us that, of course, he and his colleagues have been monitoring hot areas like the Strait of Hormuz, and that interest in Kuva's tech has been of growing interest, whether from media outlets or potential new customers. As a result, Kuva's shared satellite capacity model is certainly proving to be very well received. You can find out more about the business by heading to kuvaspace.com.

27:19And that's all for this episode of the program. We'll be back at the same time next week. The Entrepreneurs is produced by Laura Kramer with audio editing by Jack Dewars. If you'd like to contact the show, you can email Laura on lrk at monocle.com. And don't forget to follow us and catch up with the archive of past shows at monocle.com or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Tom Edwards. Goodbye. And thanks for listening to The Entrepreneurs. Thank you.