EO Summit

After the overwhelming success and positive response to EO Summit 2024, we are back with EO Summit 2025 - bigger and better. The foundational principles of EO Summit remain the same: to be user-centric, not provider-centric, and to be application-focused, not technology-focused. The conference will gather: - EO users from insurance, finance, agriculture, forestry, energy, mining, climate, sustainability, etc., - EO professionals including satellite companies, solution providers and researchers, - governmental users and policymakers, - non-profits Why NYC? Simply put, this is where most of the EO user organizations are based, making it easier for them to attend EO Summit. The sponsorship brochure is on the website (eosummit.com). Early bird ticket sales and call for speakers will be out shortly. Very excited for the next edition! PS. No, this does not mean that we are leaving London and Europe for good. We will return to London for the third edition and alternating between London and NYC.

Attending Climate Week in NYC? Interested in Earth Observation for Climate? Then, join us for our panel sessions focusing on the use of EO satellites to monitor GHG emissions, in carbon markets, and for nature & biodiversity. We have a super exciting lineup of panelists and a multidisciplinary audience. Limited spaces. Register here: https://lu.ma/h3bizvcb

Here is Debbie Kite, an EO Summit attendee writing on Space4Climate about a key learning from the conference - the need for transformation of EO climate projects to EO climate products.

📢 We are organizing an Earth Observation side event during Climate Week NYC on Sep 25 🛰️ 🌎 There will be panel discussions on the use of EO across three use cases: GHG Emission Monitoring, Carbon Markets and Nature & Biodiversity along with networking opportunities. The event is for everyone who would like to learn about the capabilities of EO for monitoring climate, with a multidisciplinary audience coming from different sectors (public, private, non-profit, investors, research etc.). Thanks to GHGSAT, Planet and Pixxel for sponsoring this event! For more information and registration: https://lu.ma/h3bizvcb

EO Summit 2025: Announcement Coming Soon ⏳

This slide from my opening note at EO Summit summarises the evolution of the commercial Earth observation sector over the past decade and a half. While the number of EO satellite companies has risen from a handful in the early 2010s to over three dozen today, we can see some common themes and trends in how the industry has evolved. Not including the longstanding industry giants such as Maxar and Airbus, I describe the growth of the commercial EO sector, or the so-called NewSpace EO as an evolution that happened in three waves: the horizontal pioneers, the vertical-focused innovators and the backward integrators. ➡️ Horizontal Pioneers from the early 2010s had to be vertically integrated as the NewSpace era had just started and few services or components were available to buy off-the-shelf. Since they were mainly pioneers in EO, they had to go with a horizontal approach to selling data to several market verticals. However, gradually they have expanded down the value chain with many of them recently starting to sell analytics. ➡️ The Vertical-Focused Innovators, thanks to the advancements in the satellite and space industries, leveraged the off-the-shelf products and the increasingly available ‘as-a-service’ models. They also had the opportunity to learn from the businesses of the horizontal pioneers that may have led them to build EO satellites to acquire data relevant to specific use cases (vs a purely horizontal approach). Given that many of these companies validated what their customers want and how they want it, they started to directly offer analytics services (vs data). ➡️ The Backward Integrators, in the meantime, started appearing in the market towards the start of the 2020s, and they came from a completely different angle. Many of these firms were analytics providers actively delivering solutions to their customers, but as a result of their strong understanding of user needs and perhaps, because they found the current crop of EO satellite companies to not answer to their needs, they pivoted to launching their own satellites, almost always with proprietary sensors and satellite architecture, designed specifically to their requirements. And, all this, while the major space agencies of the world continued to launch scientifically significant and technologically advanced EO satellites. P.S.: Yes. You might find that there are several anomalies in the market today that do not fit into any of these categories. You might even find that the vertical integration model is slowly coming back, in some companies. This is not a comprehensive market landscape, but simply a framework to understand the evolution of EO.

Following some feedback from EO Summit, we are thinking about the idea of organizing a small-scale "EO Summit: Government Edition" in Europe, mainly aimed at bringing together the government users of Earth observation with the EO industry to discuss the civilian (non-defense) applications of EO in agriculture, forestry, climate and disaster management. Just like EO Summit, the core principle of the event is to be user-focused, specifically stakeholders from different ministries and departments across Europe. The goal of "EO Summit: Gov Edition" will be for institutional users to share how EO is being used for policy monitoring and public services in their countries and for the industry to have an opportunity to hear from the government users on their needs, challenges and outlook for the use of EO. I am looking for some feedback on the concept from some relevant folks, especially whether such a government user-focused conference is of interest. Leave your thoughts below or send me a message to discuss!

Financing is tough at the moment for Earth observation companies. Finance, insurance, and EO leaders from Barclays, Citi, Descartes Underwriting, Floodbase, and Earth Daily Analytics take the pulse of a changing market from in this feature. https://lnkd.in/eeHKJssb

If you missed the keynote at EO Summit from NASA Goddard Space Flight Center's Dalia Kirschbaum, here is a good summary. Extremely fortunate to have had Dalia at the conference and hear her thoughts on NASA's role in the evolving Earth observation sector. https://lnkd.in/e3KEmR9j

Great recap by Mark Holmes & Via Satellite on the Inaugural EO Summit where there was great dialogue on what needs to happen for the EO market to evolve. Eric von Eckartsberg as part of panel comprised of representatives from Pixxel, Kuva and Planet commented. “EarthDaily built our sensors, our satellites based on buying consistent imagery, to overcome false positives. Our goal is to feed machines with data. We are looking for changes, anomalies, patterns. We have taken an integrated approach. If we move into additional analytics, that will inform our approach. Flexibility is key,” he says. “There is a lot of great free data out there. It has trained a lot of users in the value of this. It challenges the commercial community to come up with value-added capabilities. A lot of the value is the full system. You look at sectors like agriculture, and they need a full season to test data. They can’t switch on a dime to new types of analytics.” Click below to read The EO Revolution https://lnkd.in/gnarHEeM