ConstellR raised a €1 million pre-seed round led by FTTF, with the participation of OHB Venture Capital and L-Bank.

ConstellR, a Freiburg, Germany-based developer of analytics SAAS for land surface temperatures from space, announced securing a €1 million ($1.2M) pre-seed funding round.

The money was raised from German investors led by the German Tech Transfer Management fund FTTF, with the participation of strategic investor OHB Venture Capital and Baden-Württemberg’s state bank L-Bank.

ConstellR, founded in 2020 as a joint spin-off from German Fraunhofer and the German Aerospace Center by CEO Max Gulde, is looking to provide answers to the increasing need for Land Surface Temperature data as well as drastically improve humankind's capability to timely act on emerging environmental challenges.

It does that with a software-based, miniaturized architecture with “free-form optics” monitoring the land via a constellation of 30 CubeSats with thermal infrared payloads. The first system, which is due to go into orbit in December 2021, is supposed to be much cheaper to monitor the infrared part of the spectrum than traditional satellite systems and will benefit by farmers to reduce water and fertilizer usage, and this could help them reduce existing monitoring costs by 97%.