Affiliates of Antarctica Capital, an international private equity firm, today announced the acquisition of a controlling interest in Descartes Labs, a solutions provider of geospatial intelligence to leading commercial and government clients. The acquisition complements Antarctica’s existing portfolio of companies spanning New Space, Data Analytics and Digital Infrastructure.
Descartes Labs is a geospatial intelligence company that performs scientific analysis of geospatial, remote sensing, and diverse complementary data sets to enable sustainable sourcing best practices, commodity price forecasting, and efficient mineral exploration for leading CPG, Agriculture, and Mining companies. The company’s SaaS platform automates the analysis of geospatial imagery for users, enabling planetary scale analysis through artificial intelligence and machine learning. The company also supports a diverse set of federal government customers to curate, normalize, and fuse multi-source data at the speed of mission, to provide geospatial-aware actionable insights and autonomous tipping and cueing solutions through Descartes Labs Government.
Concurrent with the transaction, Antarctica operating partners Richard Davis will serve as Chief Executive Officer and Graeme Shaw will serve as Chief Operating Officer of Descartes Labs. Mr. Davis and Mr. Shaw are both highly regarded executives with decades of experience in satellite technology, data analytics and corporate finance.
Chandra Patel, Managing Director of Antarctica Capital, said, “Antarctica Capital has a strong institutional commitment to the geospatial and data analytics sectors and Descartes Labs will be very complementary to our other portfolio companies in these sectors. We are committed to maintaining Descartes’ current business, while also providing the necessary capital and expertise to ensure the company’s growth. We are confident that Antarctica can build upon Descartes legacy of innovation and insights to enable the company to realize its immense potential.”
Mr. Davis, commented, “Antarctica Capital’s investment approach emphasizes active ownership and providing more than capital to develop companies. We are extremely excited about Descartes’ business prospects and with Antarctica’s involvement the Company is poised to accelerate innovation quicker than before to offer customers more value and best in class geospatial intelligence to both the commercial and government sectors.”
Established in 2014 by a team of scientists from Los Alamos National Laboratory, Descartes Labs was founded on the belief that planetary knowledge has the power to radically alter how companies, governments, and nonprofits understand their relationship to the world’s physical systems. The Company possesses decades of experience working on some of our nation’s most difficult problems, with expertise in large-scale computing, artificial intelligence, and satellite imagery. As a geospatial intelligence company, Descartes Labs helps organizations benefit from the scientific analysis of observable, physical world events. Descartes’ SaaS platform enables custom signal development and our packaged analytics solutions create new sources of operational advantage and sustainability for customers across Agriculture, Consumer Goods, Mining, and Government. The Company also supports US federal government efforts to curate, analyze and provide unique actionable insights from geospatial data. For more information visit https://descarteslabs.com/.
Antarctica Capital is an international private equity firm headquartered in New York. Antarctica Capital is a registered investment advisor and is dedicated to investments in private markets and real assets and the establishment of long-term capital vehicles to leverage this investment focus. Antarctica Capital’s investment approach is active ownership with an inherent focus on sustainability and to provide more than capital to develop companies. The firm has an absolute return focus, which leads the firm to rigorously evaluate and build conviction around idiosyncratic investment opportunities and build value through the implementation of its investment strategies, such as SIGA®, SARO® and SEREY™. For more information visit https://antarcticacapital.com/.
