Farmers manage almost half of all European land area, making agriculture a dominant industry in Europe. A wave of the AgTech startups, initiated by the acquisition of Climate Crop by Monsanto in 2013, has reached Europe, where a startup activity is growing in the AgTech domain during last 3–4 years. Three of them are powered by Space at ESA Business Applications:

HummingBird Technologies, UK (total funding — NA) — HummingBird Tech is a company that uses drones with customized sensors and satellite to gather data and imagery to be used for precision agriculture. They make use of advanced machine learning algorithms and computer vision to provide insights on crop health. Their products include detection of crop diseases, nutrient optimization and more.

Gamaya, Switzerland (total funding USD 7.4M) — Through drone-based hyperspectral imaging, satellite data and artificial intelligence, along with the weather information, Gamaya helps to improve the efficiency and sustainability of farming businesses. They focus on delivering various crop and region-specific agronomy solutions like planting efficiency analysis, yield forecasting, weeds detection, detection of nutrients, and more.

AgriCircle, Switzerland (total funding — NA) — With a focus on maximizing yields, AgriCircle gives farmers an end-to-end software system that covers things from variable rate applications of herbicides and seeds, all the way to field history, data analytics, and emissions. Germany is the main market for the Company.

Do you also have an idea for business in AgTec? We offer funding and support for Organic Best Practice.

It has always been an expensive and time consuming mission for industries around the world to obtain quality water depth data.

With the Bathymetry demonstration project now complete, TCarta (a global provider of marine geospatial products) have launched their Bathymetrics Data Portal - the first of its kind, allowing users to search, purchase and automatically download highly accurate water depth information directly to their computers.

Satellite technology is quickly catching up with Sonar and LIDAR to measure water depths across the world and the information gathered from a sophisticated commercial constellation of optical satellites has been collated and used to populate this Portal.

The Bathymetrics Data Portal has been created with data from TCarta, DHI (experts in water environments) and DigitalGlobe (the world’s leading provider of high-resolution satellite imagery).

There is a high demand for Bathymetric products within many industries across the world including port construction, environmental monitoring and energy infrastructure development.

Using satellite imagery to measure water depth has proven to not only be a more efficient way to gather this information, it’s also faster and more accessible. Customers can now buy ready-made, instantly available high resolution 2m Bathymetry at a fraction of the cost of traditional methods.

AECOM, a global engineering firm, has been an early adopter of satellite derived bathymetry technology, making very good use of this data in order for their work to be more economical and less time consuming.

Kenny Monteath, Regional Director at AECOM said: "We have worked closely with the TCarta Team as an Involved User throughout their ESA Demonstration Project. Our early involvement in the requirements and testing phases included AECOM receiving bathymetry data and successfully applying this into a port construction and design project. AECOM are now using the Bathymetrics data portal on a regular basis to understand bathymetry availability and make the most of fast and easy access to high quality data."

Richard Flemmings, Operations Director TCarta said: "The ESA program has made it possible for us to grow our business by lowering the price point of satellite derived bathymetry, while at the same time opening up the technology to new markets who are now able to access the data instantly. Having the backing of ESA has added significant positive impact when promoting to customers."

With new areas of the world constantly being uploaded to the portal, users will always have access to the best available bathymetric information.