SAN FRANCISCO — Radiant Earth launched in 2016 with a mission to democratize open data from satellites and help the global development community put that data to work.
Anne Hale Miglarese, CEO of Radiant Earth, put out a request for proposals, and her team chose to build the platform on an existing open-source project.
But over time, their users expressed frustration with the platform, saying it was not as functional as the growing number of commercial platforms providing access to open satellite imagery and analysis tools. Meanwhile, Radiant Earth was spending $22,000 a month on this service. In May, the team decommissioned the Radiant Earth platform and selected a commercial provider for its new mission to help the global development community apply machine learning to Earth observation.