Minds Behind Maps

Indra Den Bakker is the CEO & Co-Founder of Overstory, a company providing vegetation information to electric utility companies about the state of (mostly) trees around power lines by using high resolution satellite imagery. This can lead to prevention of wildfires by finding hazardous vegetation before it falls on a line.

Dr Catherine Nakalembe is an Associate Research Professor at University of Maryland and the Program Head of NASA Harvest Africa. We talk about some of her work on using satellite imagery for Food Security in her home country of Uganda & how she got into this field in the first place.

Emily Darling & Kim Fisher both work at the Wildlife Conservation Society, respectively as the Director of Coral Reef & as Spatial Analyst. They have developed MERMAID, a platform enabling coral reef scientists to aggregate & share their data together. One of the main challenges they tackle being most measurements need to happen in the field as opposed to being able to leverage satellite imagery.

Arjen Vrielink is the Director & co-founder of Satelligence, dedicated to stopping deforestation by leveraging satellite imagery. They work directly with commodity companies who sell things like cacao or coffee to understand the causes of deforestation and how alternatives can be found.

Barbara Ryan was instrumental in the policy change in 2008 that opened up the Landsat data to being freely & openly available for anyone to access. This resulted in more than 100x uptake in the number of imagery downloaded and fundamentally changed the Earth Observation industry. She is currently the Executive Director of the World Geospatial Industry Council

Jonathan Lacoste is an Investor at Space.VC, a Venture Capital firm he started in 2021 after having founded & sold Jebbit (a company focused on aggregating & analyzing user data online for businesses for advertising). We talk about how his experience at Jebbit translates to the Earth Observation industry, why he moved from founding to investing and the learning-in-public approach he's taking.

Jeff Crusey is the Investment Director of Seraphim Space, an investing firm specialised in the space industry. They have invested in mulitple Earth Observation companies including Spire, Iceye, HawkEye 360 and Pixxel.

A year ago, I started this podcast, not knowing where it would go. 18 interviews later, I'm more excited than ever to keep doing more of these, and get even better at it.

Jakub Dziwisz is the founder & CEO of Orbify, a company that is attempting to simplify the process of building Earth Observation solutions for any application.

Jacopo Margutti is a Data Scientist at 510, the Data Team of the Netherlands Red Cross which uses remote sensing, ground measured data and insights from social media to understand & react to humanitarian crisis. During this conversation, we touch on the the work the Red Cross does around impact forecasting of typhoons, how they have helped covid vaccine distribution, but also how to work on a tight budget to provide the maximum amount of help...