MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — Urban Sky, a company that has developed portable stratospheric balloons to perform imaging and other applications typically done by satellites, has raised $30 million to expand its work.
The Denver-based company announced Feb. 6 it raised the Series B round, led by new investor Altos Ventures along with several returning investors. The company last raised $9.75 million in a Series A round in October 2023.
Andrew Antonio, chief executive of Urban Sky, said in an interview that the funding will help the company meet the growing demand it is seeing from the U.S. military in its balloons, which can take small payloads into the stratosphere for imaging, communications or other applications. That demand has grown significantly since the Series A round, he said.
“We basically have built for them a what they refer to as a personally deployable satellite,” he said of its defense customers. “One soldier, within five minutes, can launch one of our stratospheric balloons from virtually anywhere.”
He said the funding will help the company invest in improvements in the balloon system, keeping them the same size but enabling longer duration flights as well as new payloads and software to serve defense customers. The company will also invest in cameras and other payloads for commercial applications, allowing them to return data without recovering the balloon as the company has previously done.
That will enable the company to provide persistent coverage with its balloons. Antonio noted that the company recently demonstrated this by flying balloons over the Palisades fire in Los Angeles, providing longwave infrared imagery to support firefighting efforts. That persistence could also be used to monitor pipelines for illegal tapping, he said.
That capability gives Urban Sky an edge over satellite imaging companies, he argued. “There is no satellite today, nor any satellite constellation planned in the future, that can image somewhere every second,” he said, adding that his company’s balloons can also provide imagery at higher resolution and lower costs than satellites.
He does see an opportunity for satellites to complement balloons, with satellites providing global coverage that can “tip-and-cue” more localized, persistent observations by balloons. That is particularly true in defense applications, he said, where “we’re part of a much larger defense ecosystem that connects satellites to balloons to drones and aircraft and soldiers beneath it.”
On the defense side, balloons have the additional benefit that they are far less expensive than the weapons that would be used by an adversary to destroy them. “We are already offering low-cost persistence to the defense community in a way that’s economically asymmetric and that compliments the whole satellite ecosystem that they already have,” he said.
Urban Sky currently has 40 employees and expects to grow to 60 to 65 by the end of the year, Antonio said. The company flew about 150 balloons last year and projects significantly increasing that this year, with its existing 50,000-square-foot facility able to produce hundreds of balloons per month.
Altos, the lead investor in the Series B round, said it saw the potential for Urban Sky to lead long-term growth in this market. “In Urban Sky, we see a category-defining opportunity and the potential for a great, lasting company. We’re excited to partner with them to unlock the full value of the stratosphere globally,” said Anthony Lee, managing director at Altos, in a statement.
Antonio described Altos as a “patient” investor willing to support Urban Sky over the long haul. “These companies take time to mature, especially in the stratosphere where we’re at inning two of nine in terms of what I think we all believe the stratosphere can be,” he said. “That’s one of their core values at Altos, building category-defining businesses but allowing them to develop over longer time horizons.”
