Nordic Startup News Early Stage Startup News From The Nordics
The term “Crowddroning” means to unleash thousands of drones and their operators to provide ultra high resolution Earth observation data from every corner of the earth. This way, the collected data supplements the underused information the numerous satellites have to offer. The data itself is ready-to-analyze high-resolution data, straight to any server so the clients of GLOBHE can focus on analysis.
“We have gathered more than one million images of the earth so far. This is an unprecedented dataset captured by drones”, underlines Rémy Ghalayini, CTO of Globhe.
GLOBHE brings the Earth observation data available for multiple purposes. It is a new weapon when fighting against Malaria or other diseases, deforestation or even the drought in the Sahara region.
“Our drones and their operators on our platform are shaping this industry. They are the leaders of drone operations globally and create unique content. We saw the huge potential of utilizing this momentum to help solve real-life challenges, when and where it really matters.”
The company provides high resolution, global coverage, geospatial, and 3D modeling data to support businesses and research worldwide. Ordering data is relatively easy by using GLOBHE’s browser app or automatizing it through an API to receive ready-to-analyze data immediately.
“The data provided by the satellites is limited in resolution, our drones are able to provide data in more details. At the moment, we have 6325 operators in 117 countries, summarizes Mr. Ghalayini.
GLOBHE has become to the marketplace for all that Earth observation data which has been collected by thousands of drone owners and operators around the world, who are part of the Crowddroning platform.
“We have really crowdsourced, or with a better wording, “dronesourced” the world’s mapping procedure”, says Mr. Ghalayini.
A drone operator can register to Crowddroning and they will get notified of paid flying gigs nearby. They can also sell their old data so companies and organisations can buy existing data in some locations that they are interested in. Crowddroning is here to help both local dro
ne operators to have a job, and to allow clients to easily get essential data that they need by using local resources.
Global operations but the base is in Sweden
Rémy Ghalayini sees a natural and beneficial choice to be based in Sweden. In addition to Stockholm, they have employees in Gotland, Gothenburg, Luxembourg, and in the USA.
“Our playground is the entire planet, but our base is in Sweden. The kick-start of a startup has been a smooth ride, thanks to the Swedish encouraging startup environment and large VC funding available for the Swedish tech startups.”
It is obvious that when the big data is getting even bigger, GLOBHE as the platform operator must take some steps forward and heavily scale up the operations.
“We have a SaaS platform with everything being automated when processing the Big Data that we get from thousands of drones globally. We go phase by phase, see what our users need, plan new functionalities, and deploy them as soon as possible”, says Mr. Ghalayini.
Impressive goal, impressive numbers
GLOBHE also won the prestigious 2020 Zayed Sustainability Prize. The prize sum was used to make technical developments and updates to the Crowddroning platform that enables automation and scaling to a higher degree, which in turn will allow the GLOBHE team to act faster in the prevention and response of future disasters and outbreaks.
According to its mission, GLOBHE aims to improve the lives of 50 million people a year by 2030. Already last year, Crowddroning by GLOBHE helped to reduce the risk of malaria for 1.9 million people, reduce the risk of water pollution for 2.3 million people, and to increase access to clean energy for 1.2 million people.
