Ubotica has seen ‘huge demand’ for its maritime intelligence platform in the past year, it said.
Irish space-tech Ubotica has raised $11 million for its AI-powered platform for maritime security, as countries around the world gear up to monitor their waters.
The round was led by Act Venture Capital and Greencode Ventures, along with existing investor Atlantic Bridge.
Ubotica offers satellites that make real-time decisions using AI. More than 30 world-view models have been deployed so far, using “hundreds of thousands” of AI ideas and achieving a 100pc machine success rate, the company said.
The latest increase will be directed at Ubotica’s live maritime intelligence platform, which helps governments and maritime agencies detect emerging threats to critical infrastructure, including undersea communications cables and coastal power assets, in multiple maritime environments in real time.
It works by combining orbital AI with automated ground-to-orbit operations, focusing available sensors on the emerging task, rather than relying on fixed satellite collection schedules and post-Earth processing. Ubotica wants to bring technology to market at scale.
The company has seen “huge demand” for its maritime intelligence platform over the past year, it said, driven by Ubotica’s ability to develop maritime surveillance across special economic zones that are much larger than a country’s land.
“Ubotica has spent years pioneering orbital AI, and we’ve applied that knowledge to one of Earth’s toughest security challenges – protecting large marine areas and critical coastal infrastructure,” said Fintan Buckley, CEO of Ubotica Technologies.
“Live maritime intelligence predicts where threats are coming from, uses the right satellites and sensors, and delivers decision-level intelligence in minutes, giving security teams the speed and efficiency they need to act.”
Ubotica is a regular partner of NASA and the European Space Agency, having launched the first spacecraft to automatically identify a target in front and redirect itself to capture it.
Last month, the company announced a partnership with Texas-based Novi to integrate its AI platform with Novi’s smart-satellite constellation to process Earth observation data directly from satellites.
“Ubotica has been performing indexing in orbit for years and transforming static worldviews into living intelligence,” said Andrew O’Neill, principal at Act Venture Capital. O’Neill is also on Ubotica’s board.
“Nations cannot wait for hours to view images while the ship is in the dark over critical infrastructure. Living maritime intelligence proves how important onboard intelligence is – it transforms the world’s view from a camera into a real-time watchdog, starting in European waters.”
Ubotica received the SpaceNews Icon Award for the Space AI Partnership last December, along with NASA JPL and Open Cosmos.
In April, the startup announced a partnership with NASA on a test mission to demonstrate autonomous smart satellite networks.
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