Visual intelligence firm Geospatial Insight, has raised £3.5 million from private equity company Foresight Williams and VenturesOne investments.

The money will be used to improve its machine learning capabilities, boost its additional product streams and develop visual intelligence customer solutions.

Geospatial, founded in 2012, aim to give corporations and governments accurate real time data to tackle some of the world’s most challenging problems, such as crop shortages, deforestation and tracking greenhouse gas emissions by using satellites and drones.

Their programme also aims to spot trends and gain insight into global events by bringing together data from satellites, drones and aircraft.

Machine learning in farming and climate change

Machine learning gives computers the ability to learn from repeated data patterns without being programmed.

AI and drones have been used for the farming industry in recent years; giving farmers will begin receiving automated voice calls and texts in their native language that inform them when the best time to sow seeds and protect crops from pest attack is. It is understood Geospatial are seeking to gain corporations and governments as clients.

At the Geospatial World Forum in January this year, Peter Rabley, venture partner at Omidyar Network said the world needed more geospatial data, ‘About 4 billion of the population is informal. We don’t have data about on them. This impacts urbanisation, climate change, etc. This makes the role of geospatial data more crucial. We need good, fundamental data. Geospatial data is critical for understanding investments and who we are trying to help.’

The fundraising follows Series A funding by growth equity investors, completed in July 2017 and seed funding by venture capital firm Midven through the Exceed Partnership Fund in December 2014.

David Fox, CEO of Geospatial Insight commented, ‘During the next 12 months we will be strengthening our machine learning expertise and developing new customer propositions that better inform enterprise decision making.’

Bernard Fairman, chairman of Foresight Group commented, ‘Geospatial Insight addresses global challenges and is a highly scalable business. The fund’s core mandate is to support high-quality, disruptive businesses with excellent management teams and Geospatial Insight represents a premier example.’

According to a global market insights report, the commercial drone market will be worth $17 billion by 2024.

Further reading on AI

Why SMEs will lead the artificial intelligence revolution