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Spire Global

Spire Global – A Data Analytics Company Harnessing The Power Of Satellite Technology. 

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Founded in 2012, Spire Global is a data and analytics company that is known for tracking global data and using satellite technology for weather forecasting and other aviation patterns. The founders of the company are Peter Platzer, Joel Spark, and Jeroen Cappaert. Spire Global currently has around 250 employees who are serving customers from across the world. The headquarters of the company is based in San Francisco, California. Apart from San Francisco, Spire Global has offices in Boulder, Luxembourg, Washington DC, Cambridge, Singapore, and Glasgow. 

Early Days

When Spire Global was founded, its original name was NanoSatisfi Inc. The three founders of company are International Space University graduates and they founded the company as a part of the project, ArduSat. This project aimed toward democratizing access to space. Testing of the early prototypes was financially backed through crowdfunding a Kickstarter. Through this crowdfunding, Spire Global was able to raise $106,330. In November 2012, the company signed an agreement with NanoRacks for the deployment of satellites. The deployment of these two satellites became famous because it was the first US Commercial Satellite Deployment from the International Space Station. 

Spire Global required a massive amount of capital for building those satellites. For this reason, the company incubated with Lemnos Labs, and Spire raised $1.5 million in a seed funding round. The main investors were E-merge, Shasta Ventures, Lemnos Labs, Grishin Robotics, and Beamonte Investments. After one year of working in partnership with NanoRacks, the company was successfully able to release ArduSat-1 and ArduSat-X (1U CubeSats). After their release from the ISS, Spire Global quickly started transmitting data to the company’s servers.

Spire Global
Image source: spire.com

Growth and Expansion

After 1U CubeSats, the experts at Spire Global took interest in 3U nanosatellites so that they can start porting more complex payloads. Within seven months, the company transitioned from 1U to 3U and launched the first prototype in 2014. In July of the same year, the company hosted a Series A funding round and was able to raise $25 million. This funding round was led by Will Porteous from RRE Ventures and was also backed by Emerge, Mitsui & Co. Global Investment, and Mousse Partners Capital. ArduSat was a spin-off from the company as it decided to focus exclusively on educational technology. By the end of 2014 ended, Spire opened a  new office in Singapore and eventually started expanding the network. 

In 2015, the Series B funding round took place where the company was able to raise $40 million and the round was led by Promus Ventures. As the company was expanding, it was getting pressure to mass-produce satellites but space became the main constraint. So, the company opened a new office in Glasglow which also marked its entry into the European market. Spire Global became a publicly-traded company in 2021 and had a market value of $1.6 million. But recently the company is going through a rough patch due to rising losses and the close of the SPAC merger. 

Peter Platzer – CEO of Spire Global

Peter Platzer is the co-founder and CEO of Spire Global. His vision behind founding Spire Global was to provide satellite-powered data from any point on Earth. In 2013, Platzer was named White House Champion of Change for his idea to launch small form-factor satellites into space. Peter also worked at CERN and Max Planck Institute. His research was based on high frequency and high accuracy data in space and he also interned at NASA Ames’ Space Portal. He is currently a part of Harvard Business School as a career coach. 

MicroStrategy

MicroStrategy – A Powerful Business Intelligence And Data Analytics Company.

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MicroStrategy is one of the leading providers of enterprise software globally. The company was founded in 1989 in Wilmington, Delaware. The founders of the company are Michael J. Saylor, Thomas Spahr, and Sanju Bansal. It is a publicly-traded company listed on New York Stock Exchange. MicroStrategy’s main focus is on developing software and that analyzes both internal and external data and helps businesses make better decisions. The company’s headquarters is based in Virginia and it has nearly 3,200 employees.

About MicroStrategy

MicroStrategy has become a very dominating company in the business analytics sector as it has successfully built a simple UI design combined with high system performance and a universal approach. MicroStrategy has 4,000 customers spread across 26 countries for whom it provides a consistent and high-quality analytics platform. The major competitors of MicroStrategy in the market are IBM Cognos, Oracle’s BI Platform, and SAP AG Business Objects. The main goal of the company is to make sure that an enterprise has access to all its data and the platform functions optimally for the user end.

History Of The Company

Michael Saylor with a consulting contract from DuPont started MicroStrategy in 1989. He received $250,000 as start-up capital and office space in Delaware to start his work. Saylor went to MIT and while he was in college he met Sanju Bansal who joined the company shortly as a co-founder. While they were in college, both of them took a class in systems dynamics theory. Based on the idea of that subject MicroStrategy developed data mining and business intelligence software using nonlinear mathematics. After three years, the company landed its first major client, McDonald’s, and signed a contract of $10 million.

Between 1990 and 1996 the company was able to increase revenue by 100% each year. With the rapid growth, the company decided to move from Delaware to Virginia with its 50 employees. In June 1998 it applied for an IPO and became a public company. MicroStrategy eventually started focusing on its research and development division hence founded Alarm.com as part of its R&D unit.

MicroStrategy
Image source: solutionsreview.com

Economic Downfall And Lawsuit

In 2000, the company decided to restate its financial years for the preceding two years after doing a review of its accounting. When the company became a public entity its stock price rose from $7 per share to $333 per share within a year. But it started falling ($120 per share) and it was due to the burst of the dot-com bubble. The same year, MicroStrategy went through another turmoil as the US Securities and Exchange Commission filed a lawsuit against the company and its executives. The charges were mostly of fraud and the matter was settled later in December where each of those officials paid $350,000 in fines.

Recent Days Of MicroStrategy

In 2009, the company decided to sell Alarm.com for $27.7 million. The deal was finalized with a venture capital firm ABS Capital Partners. The same year the company introduced OLAP services and eventually started developing business intelligence software applications for iPhone and iPad. In the last decade, the company also expanded the range of its services as it launched a cloud-based service, MicroStrategy Cloud in 2011. In 2014, the company collaborated with Facebook and introduced a new feature on its platform called PRIME (Parallel Relational In-Memory Engine).

The company was going through a rough financial state in 2014 and decided to lay off 770 employees. Saylor also requested the company to reduce his salary to $1 from $875,000. In 2015, the company launched MicroStrategy 10 and after three years released the next version. Last year, the company released MicroStrategy 2020 which included a new design for its Hyperintelligence analytics tool.

Michael J. Saylor – Co-Founder And CEO

Michael J. Saylor is a famous American entrepreneur who is famous for co-founding MicroStrategy. He is also an author and the sole trustee of Saylor Academy. He went to MIT with a scholarship. He also joined the Theta Delta Chi fraternity where he met Sanju Bansal. In 1999 he was featured in MIT Technology Review as an “Innovator Under 35.”