Blackshark announced $20M funding round led by Microsoft’s venture fund M12 and Point72 Ventures

Blackshark, a Graz, Austria-based software provider of a 3D digital twin of Earth by extracting real-time insights powered by satellite data & artificial intelligence, announced completing a capital funding round closed at $20 million.

The money was raised from investors co-led by Microsoft’s venture fund M12 and Point72Ventures, joining a syndicate with existing investor Markus Wagner, founder of i5invest.

Brian McClendon (co-founder Google Earth), Dirk Hoke (former CEO Airbus Defense& Space) and Qasar Younis (former COO y combinator and currently CEO of Silicon Valley unicorn Applied Intuition) are joining the company’s board of advisors.

Raised funds will be used to accelerate the accessibility of the blackshark.ai platform across industries by further ramping up the global go-to-market team as well as on data scientists and developers.

Blackshark, founded in 2020 by Brad Young, CEO Michael Putz and Thomas Richter, launched with contribution to Microsoft Flight Simulator, which represents the entire planet in photorealistic 3D by building on top of massive computation power and a novel approach to Artificial Intelligence. The technology is provided as a platform service making geospatial data and 3D simulation environments available at global scale. Applications running on the blackshark.ai platform include use cases for government, geospatial intelligence, humanitarian relief, metaverse/AR, simulation for autonomous driving and flying, deforestation monitoring, insurance, smart cities and more.

Blackshark sits at the intersection of AI-based semantics extracted from geospatial mapping data at planet scale that can be combined with generating high quality synthetic 3D structure data from 2D satellite imaging using procedural generation techniques. Taken together, Blackshark is on its way to developing a new kind of semantic 3D base map of the whole planet including a digital twin of all structures on the surface of the earth.