Blackshark.ai Closes an Oversubscribed Extension to its Series A Round, Totaling $35 Million, to Fast-Track Commercialization of its Unique GEOINT and 3D Mapping Technology.

BURLINGAME, Ca / GRAZ, Austria; November 16, 2023. 

Blackshark.ai, a leading AI geospatial intelligence (GEOINT) company, known for creating the first 3D digital twin of the entire Earth for Microsoft’s Flight Simulator, announces the successful closure of an oversubscribed $15 million Series A extension, thereby raising the total Series A round to $35 million.

Existing investors Point72 Ventures, M12 Microsoft’s Venture Fund, and Maxar are joined by In-Q-Tel (IQT), Safran, ISAI Cap Venture, Capgemini’s VC Fund managed by ISAI, Einstein Industries Ventures, Interwoven Ventures (formerly ROBO Global Ventures), Ourcrowd, Gaingels and OpAmp Capital.
Michael Putz, CEO of blackshark.ai, states, “The new partnerships strengthen our vision to democratize high-frequency 3D mapping applications across an extensive range of geospatial use cases, both public and private.”

Originating from the dynamic world of video gaming, blackshark.ai emerged as a pioneer offering government and commercial clients dynamic, high-frequency 3D mapping, geospatial intelligence, and valuable insights, empowering them to make informed, strategic decisions. Traditional 3D mapping based on photogrammetry is slow and costly, and requires a large amount of imagery, while blackshark.ai can deliver 3D visualization for digital twins, training & simulation rapidly at scale for a fraction of the cost with one single image.

At the core of blackshark.ai’s innovation is a platform that seamlessly transforms massive volumes of raw data from satellite and aerial imagery into semantically labelled geospatial Digital Twins. This ground-breaking software not only facilitates rapid and accurate object detection and classification at scale without the need for extensive, costly, and time-consuming training data, but also enables comprehensive analysis of land use and land cover.

Blackshark.ai empowers organizations to harness unmatched intelligence and insights to address a wide range of global challenges, including security, environmental conservation, urban planning, critical infrastructure monitoring, disaster response and humanitarian aid.

IQT highlighted the platform’s potential for meeting geospatial intelligence and training use cases, while Lucia Sinapi-Thomas, Capgemini Ventures Managing Director, states that:  “blackshark.ai’s technology has shown great potential for applications in renewables, critical infrastructure monitoring, real estate property management, urban planning, and autonomous vehicles, among many others.”
Safran Corporate Ventures’ CEO, Florent Illat adds, “blackshark.ai’s expertise in high-frequency mapping using satellite imagery unlocks new potential for Safran’s development in Position, Navigation, and Timing applied to all domains such as autonomous or collaborative missions as well as training and simulation.”

Jana Hecker from Einstein Industries Ventures states: “We believe blackshark.ai is a category-defining software company operating in the fast-growing GEOINT market and with the potential to deliver key digital twin capabilities to industries in the IoT era.”

With this latest funding, blackshark.ai is strategically positioned to advance their mission of expanding their 3D high-frequency mapping and geospatial intelligence capabilities offering immense value across a diverse range of sectors and addressing their challenges on a global scale. The funding will be allocated to support strategic technology developments and to bolster blackshark.ai’s sales and marketing activities.

CEO Michael Putz: “We aim to become the foundational geospatial search engine for real-time, actionable geospatial insights on a global scale.“