TAMPA, Fla. — A Vienna-based startup has raised $4 million to expand its software platform that generates synthetic satellite data to train AI models to detect environmental and operational risks.
On March 11, Another Earth announced seed funding from European venture investors and an Austrian government-backed innovation program.
Maya Pindeus, CEO of Another Earth, who co-founded the startup in 2024, said the funding will accelerate the rollout of software the company already provides commercially to geospatial analytics companies such as Brazil’s NovaTerra and South Africa’s GeoTerra Image (GTI).
“In particular, we are prioritizing applications that span some of the world’s most complex biomes in Brazil and sub-Saharan Africa,” she said in an email.
“By producing high-resolution synthetic geospatial data and scenario simulations for these regions, Another Earth enables organizations to monitor biodiversity, track deforestation, and simulate environmental risks across some of the most complex and fragile ecosystems on Earth.”
This technology can also help organizations estimate forest carbon stocks and other environmental indicators that are increasingly linked to regulatory compliance.
“We see significant growth opportunities by extending these predictive risk models to energy and supply chain monitoring, where accurate temporal scenario simulation is invaluable for proactive decision-making,” Pindeus said.
The funding marks the startup’s first significant external investment and is aimed at moving the company from deep technology research and development to broader commercial deployment.
While the space analytics market is growing with multiple providers, the broader Earth observation industry is currently bottlenecked by a lack of high-quality training data, Pindeus said.
“High-quality training data is expensive and prone to bias, and difficult-to-access areas and important ‘edge cases’ are often missed,” she added. “Most analytics companies are forced to rely on this limited, manually labeled data.”
Another Earth addresses this problem by combining proprietary generative AI and procedural 3D processing to create entirely new, high-resolution synthetic images, allowing developers to generate large amounts of labeled data needed to train more reliable AI models.
The startup also aims to ease the development of geospatial AI tools by providing broader access to training data and simulated environmental scenarios.
Another Earth is the second Austrian space company to announce funding in recent weeks, amid an influx of investment into Europe’s space sector.
“We believe this surge is primarily driven by the growing strategic understanding that Europe needs to achieve technological and operational independence in space,” Pindeus said.
“This recognition has been driven by increased targeted investment in the European Space Agency (ESA) and parallel national efforts to foster a collaborative and well-funded ecosystem for deep tech and space startups across the continent.”
Earth’s other funding round included early-stage investors Wake-Up Capital, Rockstart, Inovexus, and Stamco, with additional support from two Austrian government-backed funding programs: the Austrian Wirtschaftsservice (AWS) and the Austrian Agency for the Promotion of Research (FFG).
