May 6, 2024
The growing Marble-Team in April 2024
The Bremen based NewSpace company Marble Imaging has completed its transition to a public limited company (AG) and welcomes its first investors.
Marble Imaging AG transition finalized, Supervisory Board appointed
Pre-Seed funding round of 650,000 Euros successfully completed
06/05/2024
Bremen, Germany – Marble Imaging is advancing rapidly. The company has transitioned from a GmbH to a public limited company (AG) and appointed Dr. Ana Fernandez del Rio, a leading data scientist at Causal Foundry, and Dr. Rüdiger Schönfeld, Director of Earth Observation at OHB, a prominent aerospace and technology company, to its supervisory board. As a distinguished economist who has previously held board positions at various major corporations and numerous supervisory boards, Peter Biewald will serve as the chairman.
Peter Biewald: ”I am really proud to get the opportunity to support this excellent team on its way to the stars. I am confident, together we will become the leading European player in our market.”
Additionally, Marble welcomes its Pre-Seed investors led by Thomas Künzle, who have invested 650,000 Euros in the NewSpace company. The funds are designated for company expansion, the development of data analytic products, and the design of the first satellite prototype in collaboration with the Polish payload manufacturer Scanway.
Thomas Künzle, Partner and CEO of Belesta AG: ”We believe in Marble‘s team and vision and we see passion, determination and knowledge. Good work combined with patience will pay off.“
Marble Imaging has made a significant stride toward its goal of developing the first commercial European small satellite constellation for daily very-high resolution Earth Observation to strengthen Europe's independence in the EO sector. Over the next decade, the company aims to put up to 200 small satellites into space, mapping the planet daily with a very high resolution of 80 centimeter ground sampling distance. Future satellites are set to capture data across eight channels in total, three of those are planned to be in the short-wave infrared range with a resolution higher than 10 meters, aiming for compatibility with Sentinel-2 data from the European Copernicus Mission.
Simultaneously, the company currently offers advanced analytical products derived from already existing satellite data, which it continues to refine and plans to make accessible via a user-friendly web portal which is also in development. These analyses focus on quantifying environmental vulnerability by identifying and monitoring contributing factors in various areas including marine ecosystems, agriculture, infrastructure, land and forests, and coasts, among others.
Fig. 1: Water Quality Analysis by Marble Imaging
”We are proud to have reached this point so quickly and are grateful for the trust placed in us by the German Aerospace Center DLR and ESA, as well as by our investors,” says Robert Hook, CEO of Marble Imaging.
”The integration of Earth Observation data into scalable analytical products is the future”, Dr. Gopika Suresh, Marble’s Chief Strategy Officer adds. ”We have many ideas on how to make complex data understandable and accessible to a wide range of users, and we are working tirelessly to continue advancing in this direction.”
November 23, 2023
From left to right: Scanway – Jędrzej Kowalewski (CEO) and Mikołaj Podgórski (COO), Marble Imaging – Dr. Gopika Suresh (CSO), Alexander Epp (CMO) and Robert Hook (CEO)
Bremen, Germany and Wroclaw, Poland – Marble Imaging, a German company that develops Earth Observation (EO) services powered by a constellation of VHR-Satellites, and the Polish NewSpace company Scanway, which delivers advanced optical instruments for space, have announced a strategic partnership today.
The subject of the cooperation will be the joint development of the multispectral payload for a constellation of small satellites for Earth Observation owned by Marble Imaging. The targeted constellation will include up to 200 satellites weighing around 100 kg each, planned to be launched in several stages within the next decade, providing repeated global imaging in the very high-resolution sector.
“Our strategic partnership will strengthen European cooperation in the Earth Observation domain”, says Robert Hook, CEO and Co-Founder of Marble. “We’re looking forward to jointly developing cutting edge optical and multispectral payloads with Scanway for our constellation.”
The cooperation has barely begun and has already resulted in winning the prestigious German “Kleinsatelliten Nutzlastwettbewerb” competition by DLR, which will enable the development and launch of the demonstrator satellite for the future constellation. Winning the award includes free provision of the satellite platform and transport into space. Scanway will be responsible for developing and supplying hardware – that is, Earth Observation telescopes that will work on board the satellites to provide the best quality data. The company's team has more than seven years of experience in the development of optical payloads.
“An exciting task for Scanway in the project will be to deliver a telescope allowing a very high-resolution of less than one meter (targeted 0.7 meter). The company's long-term goal is to create solutions for constellations, which involves scaling up the production process”, says Mikołaj Podgórski, COO and Co-Founder of Scanway. “We are aware of this challenge, that’s why, starting January, we will have laboratory and workshop spaces nearly four times larger than before thanks to Scanway's new headquarters, and in the next few years we will implement further production scaling processes.”
The satellites will provide global data of the Earth’s surface at a targeted resolution of 0.7-meter Ground Sampling Distance (GSD) in the Visual and Near Infrared (NIR) spectrum and will include a panchromatic band. Future satellites will also be able to image with Short Wave Infrared (SWIR) bands. The data and derived analytics will offer valuable insights for a diverse range of clients in the EU and around the world. The cooperation between capable European companies targets to strengthen the Europe based EO industry.
“Developing our own European constellation is a big step towards breaking the dependency on the big non-European players, that are currently dominating the market”, says Alexander Epp, Co-Founder of Marble Imaging and Head of Marketing and Sales. Marble’s role will be to process, analyze and transform the obtained EO data into added value products and services. “Our goal is to create a future where rapid and informed decision-making using up-to-date, uninterrupted, accessible and detailed EO data is seamless”, says Dr. Gopika Suresh, Co-Founder and Marble’s Chief Strategy Officer.
With more than a decade worth of experience in this field, the team behind Marble has aligned themselves with the core themes of sustainability and capacity building and aims to cater their analytics and insights to the needs of real-world applications and people. These include governmental organizations or commercial companies involved in environmental monitoring, implementation of sustainability and climate adaptation regulations, ensuring food security, as well as security, stability, and humanitarian aid purposes.
About Marble Imaging
Marble Imaging GmbH was founded in August 2023 in Bremen, a center of Germany's aerospace innovation. Covering the entire spectrum of Earth Observation from mission design and management to data processing and analytics, Marble strives to set the benchmark for streamlined EO services for commercial and government customers. Marble's founders have more than 10 years of experience in space systems and satellite data processing, and CEO Robert Hook has been responsible for managing major space missions, including the Copernicus CO2M mission.
For more information visit www.marble-imaging.de
About Scanway
Scanway is a high-tech company based in Wrocław, Poland. The team specializes in the field of vision systems and optical systems for different applications in space and on Earth. The company is divided into two fields: Scanway Space (advanced optical instruments for the space industry) and Scanway Industry (vision systems for quality control). The company has more than seven years of experience in the space industry and TRL 9 for its solutions. Scanway offers two types of products: optical telescopes for Earth Observation and camera systems for space applications, and it also conducts R&D activities in the field of optoelectronics. Since 2023, Scanway is a public company with 50+ employees on board.
For more information visit https://scanway.space/
Marble Imaging AG
Register Court: Amtsgericht Bremen HRB 40178 HB
© All rights reserved
