Australian remote sensing company Esper wants to capture hyperspectral images from space at a fraction of the price of its competitors.
The company, which will launch its first demonstration satellite today on SpaceX’s Transporter-10 mission, is entering a field full of competition. There’s a reason for this: Hyperspectral is an incredibly powerful type of remote sensing technology that uses a spectrometer to identify the spectral signature of objects. This allows users to detect the chemical fingerprint of many different substances, including minerals, chemicals, gases and vegetation.
Armed with just $1 million in upfront funding and help from the Australian government on their first mission, Esper aims to beat better capitalized peers with lower cost technology.
The goal of this first mission, called Over the Rainbow, is to validate the company’s core technology on a demonstration spacecraft: a spectrometer system and proprietary software that “reads” the spectral images. Esper keeps costs low by using many off-the-shelf components and consumer-grade electronics, rather than more expensive optics. the software ensures that the data is accurate.
“We are very smart sensors. That’s what really separates us from all the other spectrometers and hyperspectral hardware out there,” said Esper CEO and co-founder Shoaib Iqbal. “We’re a really low-cost facility because we use a lot of off-the-shelf components, consumer-grade electronics, and then design it to be space-ready. There’s a lot of software that actually goes into making sure it works this way. Otherwise, we’re recording spectral gibberish and you can’t really tell.”
Esper was founded in early 2021 by Iqbal and Joey Lorenczak, who met when they sat next to each other in a chemistry class at Monash University in Melbourne. The two participated in a number of hackathons together. they ended up winning Unihack, a Melbourne student hackathon, in 2019 for a different space-focused idea, but turned to Earth observation after experiencing a particularly devastating bushfire season that year.
“The whole of southeast Australia was burning,” Iqbal said. “We were like, hey, we’re already working on space technology, so why not focus on Earth observation to prevent a lot of these disasters from happening in the future. That’s how we got into hyperspectral.”
The two began courting prospective clients from both the mining industry and companies working in disaster relief. That early response prompted the founders to “go all in” on hyperspectral, he said.
The company joined the Techstars space accelerator cohort in the spring of 2023. Through this program, they met people in major US government agencies interested in buying hyperspectral imagery, such as the Space Force and the National Reconnaissance Office. (NRO already has began issuing study contracts to private hyperspectrum providers, including startups.)
Along the way, the team also closed $1 million in funding from investors including Stellar Ventures, Day One Ventures and Dolby Family Ventures, as well as securing grants from Alexis Ohanian’s 776 Foundation and the Australian Federal Government.
Esper plans to launch a second demonstration satellite with the same hardware later this spring with India’s ISRO. The startup aims to begin launching commercial payloads by late next year or early ’26 and have 18 satellites in orbit, providing a daily rate of revisits, by 2028.
