Leprince imagin labs_2012_09_28_4

www.imaginlabs.com

# of Customers Day 1 11Day 2 12Day 3 5Day 4 10Day 5 3

Total 41

SebastienLeprince (PhD)

FrancoisAyoub (MS)

JamesHollingsworth (PhD)

JiaoLin (PhD)

TamaraKnutsen (grad)

Space Borne Environmental Intelligencevia SUPER high-precision co-registration

of satellite imagery

Partners

• Imagery providers (DigitalGlobe)

• USGS/NASA scientists

• University researchers using our free software

Activities• R&D on multi-angle imagery, image fusion/registration• Computing engine dev/testing/releasing?• (web) UI• Dev/admin computing infrastructure • Customizing to customer needs

Value Prop.

Service for 2D or 3D sub-pixel registration of satellite images

Cust. Relations

• “consulting” style

Cust. Segments

• Precision agriculture companies/Forestry

• NASA: processing of Mars imagery• USGS: damage assessment/earthquakes• Oil and Gas: sand dune risk and pipeline routing

Resources• Scientists / developers• Hardware (cloud?)• High bandwidth network• Patents and company “know how” • User feedbacks/newsletters/blogs

Channels

• Direct sales or via distribution partner• Data exchange via network (ftp)• Data exchange via FedEX for large volume

Costs

• Wages, office space• Workstations and servers• High-bandwidth internet connection• Cloud services• Caltech royalties

Revenue

• Revenue from processing services (subscription, pay per image with volume discount)

Day 1

Day 1• Technology description: Caltech technology to co-register time-series of

satellite and aerial imagery with accuracy better than 1/10 of the image pixel size.

• Initial hypothesis: Basically, everyone in remote sensing SHOULD be interested!

• Customer Segments:– Oil & Gas, Pipeline monitoring– Disaster assessment– Agriculture– Mars imagery processing

• Experiments: – Discussions with NASA, USGS, USDA personnel– Discussions with pipeline consultant

Partners





Value Prop.

Automated and fast service for multi-spectral image registration

problems faced by crop consultants: manual registration, data timeliness, higher resolution harder to register, in-season analysis

Service for 2D or 3D sub-pixel registration of satellite images

Cust. Relations


Cust. Segments

• Crop-consulting companies for crop monitoring• vegetable crops = most lucrative• high-end in-season crop monitoring companies are interested, but still need to find good leads at Cargill+ADM•Possible interest from DEA, difficult to find contacts• Defense• NASA: processing of Mars imagery• USGS: damage assessment/earthquakes• Oil and Gas: sand dune risk and pipeline routing


Channels

• Direct sales or via distribution partner• Data exchange via network (ftp)• Data exchange via FedEX for large volume

Costs

• Wages, office space• Workstations and servers• High-bandwidth internet connection• Cloud services• Caltech royalties

Revenue


Day 2

Day 2

• Not everyone cares!

• Too many market segments. Refocus on agriculture only, drop other customer segments. Agriculture seems to be the most responsive customer segment with strongest feedback.

• New hypothesis: Crop monitoring needs better image registration to extract maps of crop/soil variability over time

• Need to better understand the global remote sensing ecosystem.

• Experiments: – Contacted crop consultant companies– Contacted several branches of USDA and academic agriculture

institutions

Satellite image

providers

Annual revenue

WHERE WE WANT TO BE!

Oil & Gas, Mining

Agriculture

Science Research

Mapping

Insurance

Civil engineering

Exxon Mobile, Shell, BP, Fugro, etc

Crop consultants, farmers, cooperatives, Cargill, Monsanto, GeoSys

RMS, Aon, ABS,

Universities, Research labs

Google Maps, Apple

Parsons, McCarthy

MOST PROMISING FEEDBACK!Therefore, focusing on this for now…

Federalapplications

Military: USAF, USACE, NGA,…

Federal Agencies: USGS, NASA, NOAA, Caltrans,…

40%

60%Annual revenue

Satellite Remote Sensing Ecosystem

Partners





Value Prop.

Problem: manual registration of satellite image before comparison

Value Prop.: - automated- fast- very accurateservice for satellite image registration

Cust. Relations


Cust. Segments

U.S. Crop consultantsInternational Crop consultant

USDA(No registration issue (for now!))

Agri. Universities(lack of money, only use Landsat, which has no registration issue)


Channels

• Web access• Data exchange via network (ftp)• Data exchange via FedEX for large volume

Costs

• Wages, office space, workstations and servers• Cloud services• Caltech royalties

Revenue


Day 3

Day 3-4

• Narrowed focus of customer segment to Precision Agriculture

• New hypothesis: In-season crop monitoring needs better image registration to extract maps of crop/soil variability over time

• Customer segments:– International crop consultants– Insurance, investment banks, commodity funds

• Experiments:– Contacted farmer cooperatives about in-season monitoring– Contacted crop consultants

What we learned: Need is much smaller than expected

USGS delivers free Landsat imagery with decent registration, sufficient for basic crop monitoring

Other satellite imagers are less widespread, due to costs

High-end crop monitoring requires non-Landsat satellites (bad registration)

In-season crop monitoring interest is HUGE

Airborne or ground-based systems compete with satellite imagery for high-end crop monitoring

USDA delivers crop yield statistics but does not provides services to farmers

Contacted a major player for in-season crop monitoring (interested in precise and fast registration of images from non-Landsat)

Provided trial runs on series of images they could not register. Confirmed that our results exceeded all commercial solutions

Strongly interested in subcontracting registration processing to us

Potential revenue $75k-$250k/year need more crop consultant companies

Decision Tools turn Ag Info into Actionables

Precision Agriculture EcosystemData Analysis to Produce Ag Info

from Im Data

Data Preprocess for Quality Assurance

Data Acquisition

Satellite Image Providers:

RapidEyeDMC

Digital GlobeAstrium

SaboteurPartnered Image

Processing:Space Metric

USERSPrecision Ag Consultants:

GeosysSatShotInTime

Farmers EdgeFarmWorks

SST SoftwareZedX

MonsantoSyngenta

RecommendersAgribusiness

Owners

RecommendersFarmers & Farm

Collectives

RecommendersAg Insurance Companies

RecommendersCommodities IB

RecommendersHedge, Equity

Funds

Aerial Image Providers:GeoVantage

Ground-based Sensors Providers

Partners





Value Prop.

Problem: manual registration of satellite image before comparison

Value Prop.: - automated- fast- very accurateservice for satellite image registration

Cust. Relations


Cust. Segments

International Crop consultant for farmers

‘Crop forecast’ offices from Insurance/Investment firms

USDAAgri. Universities

Channels

• Web access• Fast data exchange via network (ftp)• Web access• Fast data exchange via network (ftp)

• Data exchange via FedEX for large volume


Costs


Revenue


Day 4

What we learned:

USDA is not a potential client - confirmed

Limitation: too long revisit time of the satellite for in-season. Hardware limitation.

Limitation: lag-time between image analysis results and field decisions. Need better integration with the tools of end-user. ( potential opportunity)

Farmers and cooperatives do not seem to contribute to the largest revenue from satellite that needs correction.

Insurance companies and Investment/hedge funds may contribute to a significant portion of the revenue (WAG)

Performed bandwidth experiment with in-season imagery

Automatic web-based processing is suitable for crop consultants as long as data volume does not exceed more than a few images per day. Otherwise, should use faster bandwidth to insure timely delivery of information to farmers.

Partners




• USDA


Value Prop.

Problem: manual registration of satellite image and spectral analyses of sat im time-series

Value Prop.: - Fast, automated,

accurate satellite image registration and analysis

- More Intuitive Decision Tools

Cust. Relations


Cust. Segments

US and International Crop consultants for farmers

‘Crop forecast’ for Insurance/Investment firms

USDAAgri. Universities

Channels

• Web access• Fast data exchange via network (ftp)• Web access• Fast data exchange via network (ftp)

• Data exchange via FedEX for large volume


Costs


Revenue


Day 5

What we learned about Precision Agriculture:• No universal “black box” solutions• NEED better algorithms for:

– Fertilizer rates – Seeding rates – Herbicide rates

• No “cheap” way of getting soil fertility – Intense manual grid sampling – Direct automatic soil sampling

(like AgroBotics AutoProbe) – indirect sampling technologies

(like electrical conductivity) – Remote sensing approaches

(Airborne, satellite, in-field solutions)

• NEED individuals or algorithms who can compile and prepare data from disparate data sources for Variable Rate and Site-Specific Ag

• Direct benefits of Prec. Ag:– Increased efficiency in terms of:

labor hours, crop yields, amounts of chemicals and water needed and applied.

– Long-term spatial recording of operations good for:

Future land/ag management,

litigations, insurance claims, increased farm enterprise

value

What we learned about farmer needs:

• Farmer interest correlated with kind of crop: – Lucrative Vegetable/Fruit Crops >> Grains– Annual Sensitive Crops (Cotton,Tomato) >> Perennials (Vineyards)

• Most farmers WOULD ADOPT satellite crop monitoring if cheaper and higher temporal sampling (comparisons every 2-3 days rather than 2 weeks).

Day 5

• New hypothesis: In-season crop monitoring needs improvements in image registration, spectral analyses and algorithms to turn satellite data into useful decision tools.

• Customer segments:– International crop consultants– Insurance, investment banks, commodity funds

• Experiments:– Contacted crop consultants about in-season monitoring

Some numbers… that don’t add-up!

• Imagery costs between $0 (free low res Landsat) and $0.8/km2

• Farmers can afford up to $1-2/acre/year on imagery for pasture crops (cheapest scenario) with ~2 week sampling equiv $9.5/im/km2!

• Nevertheless: many dedicated agriculture satellites exist Who really uses them? (Hunch: Insurance and Investors)

• Need better knowledge (more customer investigations) of who spends the most on satellite imagery for agriculture

• Essential information to estimate the market potential is missing

Next Steps…

• Customer Development Process with insurance and financial institutions (need more contacts like van Beurden Insurance in CA)

• Cust. Dev. to explore interest/need in Integrated Data/Decision Tools and Long-term Spatial Data Management for Farmers

• Figure out how to get lower cost, more frequent sat images for ag use.

Market Size

• TAM: Precision Agriculture in US: $450M (2010), $1.5B (2017) McKinsey, December, 2011

• SAM: ~50 worldwide (WAG) satellite crop-consultant companies. ~10 in US $250K/yr * 50: $12.5M/yr

• Current Target Market: 10% of SAM, ~ $1.2M/yr Niche Market

• Future trends: Precision agriculture (TAM) growth: 19% annually. McKinsey, December, 2011

Leprince imagin labs_2012_09_28_4

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