Affiliates of Antarctica Capital, an international private equity firm, announced on August 4 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. Davis and 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.”
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.”
Source: Antarctica Capital
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By Loren Blinde
August 4, 2022
