DC-Based Climate Tech Startup Acquires Competitor
WASHINGTON — Less than two months after announcing it has received $20 million in new funding, Hydrosat, a D.C.-based thermal data and analytics company, has acquired IrriWatch, a Dutch competitor that delivers daily climate, crop and soil-condition updates to farmers in 62 countries.
Hydrosat, founded in 2017, intends to begin gathering thermal and multispectral infrared data via satellite and providing it to customers next year.
Its goal, as outlined on its website, is twofold. One, to enable its customers to reduce their use of water, and two, as a byproduct, to help them scale back electricity use.
“Hydrosat’s research on farms over three continents has demonstrated that by using thermal imagery to guide irrigation decisions, growers can increase crop yields by as much as 50% while consuming 25% less water,” the company said in a written statement.
IrriWatch, also a fairly new company, having been founded before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, gathers environmental data from thermal sensors on satellites and relies on proprietary algorithms to suss out such details as soil temperature and moisture content, water consumption and agricultural production.
It also has the ability to analyze the amount of carbon being sequestered in a given area and provide targeted forecasts to farmers on a daily basis.
Now that the two companies are becoming one, Hydrosat’s thermal data will bring a whole new level of insight to the IrriWatch platform.
In a written statement, Hydrosat CEO Pieter Fossel said his company’s acquisition of IrriWatch “marks a significant milestone in the continued growth of our company and enables us to accelerate the delivery of real solutions that fulfill our mission to increase global food production with less water.”
Hydrosat was founded out of a recognition that moisture stress accelerated by climate change is disrupting the global food supply, while major storms, droughts, flooding and wildfires like those that blanketed the D.C.-area with smoke last week, are threatening peoples’ lives, health and the economy.
The problem Fossel and his colleagues are hoping to solve involves the limits of thermal data due to infrequency and coarse image resolution.
To address that, the company has secured a license agreement with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to operate a private remote sensing space system and signed a $1.2 million contract through AFWERX, the innovation arm of the U.S. Air Force, to adapt its surface temperature data.
As a result, Hydrosat says it will soon be providing the real-time imagery data to government agencies, agribusiness, insurance companies and emergency response teams, allowing them to respond quickly and effectively.
Dan can be reached at [email protected] and @DanMcCue
