Harnessing the Power of Satellites: Spire Launches Maritime Analytics Products

In a recent announcement, Spire Global has made public two new machine learning and analytics products backed by data from a huge constellation of ship-tracking satellites. Both products make finding vessels and information about them easier and faster by utilizing Spire’s easily accessible analytics API.

In the past, companies looking to ingest ship-tracking data would have to sift through millions of database entries each day to find ships of interest for making crucial business decisions. Spire Sense Vessels utilizes analytics to find the latest information about any of over 300 thousand ships in the ocean using a single request to the company's API.

These new products are enabled by a dramatic increase in the amount and quality of maritime data captured by Spire’s ever-improving space based infrastructure and terrestrial data intelligence. New satellites, on-orbit software upgrades, and new ground stations have been the main contributors to the transformation. “Our satellites now collect data from over 75 thousand unique ships each day, they’re tracked in a database of over 300 thousand ships that we keep tabs on, and we can predict where ships are going based on their past and present behavior,” said Peter Platzer, CEO, Spire. “This is the successful accomplishment of our mission to provide our customers with More Ships, More Often, More Intelligently.”

The increase in data has been critical to customers. With 40 satellites in orbit and a combined terrestrial feed, Spire now provides a complete global coverage map. Its advanced analytics capabilities sift through hundreds of millions of data points to provide simple answers to complex queries through an easy-to-use API. Improvements on these analytics will continue throughout 2017 and 2018, driven by more launches, ground stations, software upgrades, and advancements in machine learning.