Danti is emerging from stealth today with the announcement of a $2.75M pre-seed funding round, according to a release shared with Payload.
What is Danti? The startup, which was founded this year, seeks to make the huge amount of EO information collected in space and from other sources easier to use. The company is building a simple AI-driven search engine that can quickly sort through pictures and data collected by satellites, drones, and aircraft, as well as other information from analytics firms and social media.
“There’s a staggering amount of data out there, but it’s all siloed and distributed. As a result, this valuable data is only available to experts who know exactly where to look for it and how to piece it together,” Jesse Kallman, CEO and cofounder of Danti, said in a statement. “Danti is on a mission to open access to data on physical locations by building the market’s first search engine—one that’s as easy to use as the popular search engines we all use to surf the web.”
An example: The tech has obvious defense and intel applications to allow officials to quickly and efficiently search through all the data collected by government satellites. But it also has practical everyday use cases. Someone could pose the search engine a simple question, such as “how old is the roof at my address?” Danti will pull county permit records, high-res imagery of the property and other analytics to answer the question, according to the press release.
The round: The pre-seed round was led by Tech Square Ventures. Other participants include Radius Capital, Philip Krim and Raven One Ventures, SpaceVC, Overline, Tareyton Ventures, Jordan Noone, Keith Masback, and Jeff Crusey.
The money will be used to speed up development of the company’s search engine tech.
But wait, there’s more: Danti is also announcing that it won an open challenge in April sponsored by the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency. The company is now working with defense and intel agencies to bring its search tool to national security operators.
“We are building a search engine that brings order to the chaos,” Martice Nicks, CTO and cofounder, said in a statement. “By leveraging the latest advancements in AI and [natural language processing], Danti will empower our defense, intelligence, and commercial customers to make searching their own data, and all publicly available data, as simple as searching the web.”
