 had a successful main engine cutoff, stage separation, ignition of that second stage engine, and there goes that bearing, and there you can see all on stage two headed to some synchronous orbit. So what we just saw Becca was video recorded last night finish time from the Vandenberg Air Force Base in California near Los Angeles where SpaceX launched their latest rocket that took into orbit the ISI X2 satellite. That's your second satellite that is now in orbit. So congratulations. Thanks. The makeup stuff did a good work. We stayed all up just last night. You have to understand these guys and ladies have been working on this satellite for what, two and a half years now? Yeah, it's been a while. And can you just imagine what it must feel like to have a product that you've created actually launched, not launch launch like in you know normal tech speech but actually get launched into orbit. I think that's just amazing. So it's a hard deadline. So it's a really hard deadline. It's one deadline you can't miss. Well, tell us what makes your satellite special? Right, yeah. So this is our second satellite. It's a radar imaging satellite and it's the second smallest radar imaging satellite in the world because we also already launched this year earlier the smallest radar imaging satellite in the world. With radar what we can do is this is that we can take images through clouds and also in the nighttime. So this allows us to sort of this is the sort of building block of the infrastructure that we're intending to build to sort of monitor the earth at all times and in all conditions. Got it. And so let me get this straight. If we've got satellites up in orbit right now, they've been launched by various companies. Now right now over Helsinki I was just coming in and I could not see the sky. I could not see the stars. I couldn't even see the sun because there's cloud cover. That's great. So is your satellite able to see through that cloud cover into the area over here right now? Yes, that's that's true. Like that's the whole point of why we wanted to build this this imaging radar instrument that like we can see majority of the world actually being either dark or cloudy at any given time. So just to get to a business that you can actually reliably monitor anything like you have to have this type of sensor. And this hasn't existed before. Right I mean this sensor has existed before as technology. What we made what makes us know our thing very special and very hard to do is that we did it at hundredfold smaller mass and cost than anybody else has done before. So and again you know why we decided that we want to do this ourselves sort of again if you will you know was just it like the you if you want to run a commercial business doing really rapid monitoring you're going to need a lot of satellites and there was just no way we were going to close a business model with satellite unit that is going to cost hundreds of millions each. So we got ourselves you know a really kick ass engineering team and and it just you know set on this challenge that you know effectively was deemed to be impossible and you know spent a couple of years on it and now now we have the good building block to start you know scaling up our business. Yeah well let's talk about your founder story a little bit. So I'm going to just preface this by saying that in 2015 a good friend of mine Petri Koponen from Lifeline Ventures actually my former co-founder mentioned to me that he had met a couple of really interesting young students at the Alto University of radio science and technology who had a somewhat odd idea and he recommended that I should probably talk to them and so I remember we met on Boulevard. I actually I was I was there I was briefly visiting town with with my friend Oh Malik from True Ventures and and we we had lunch with you guys. That's true yeah that's true. That was our our first encounter with the Silicon Valley Venture Capitalist. It was a bit of a weird meeting. And so you were both students at the Alto University and I think you're still both students right? Have you graduated yet? We haven't graduated it's it's it's a bit ambiguous whether I'm still a student or not but but yeah yeah one day. One day okay well something to look forward to as you keep launching. So well I can say that from that conversation two things were apparent. I remember talking with Ohm and saying well what did you think? And and he said I don't know and I said you know what I think they're gonna do it. And it was pretty much on the spot that we made the investment decision and True Ventures led your seed round that was back in 2015. Yeah that's correct. And now this year you raised I think about 29 million euros that's about 36 million dollars and in total you've raised over 60 million dollars so far. What do you see as the business here? Why are top tier Silicon Valley VCs putting so much money into ISI? I think you know sort of the big vision that we're trying to do over here is sort of create another layer of Earth observation so imaging from space that is sort of just as reliable and and sort of like business usable as you know GPS is today so so a lot of companies are completely relying on using GPS as you know the backbone of an application and there is this inherent trust that it's always going to be there. And right now there isn't a system that would provide you access to you know imaging like you know to look at the things that don't have sensors on them. So what we really want to do is is that we really want to make a system that allows you sort of to have access to understanding what's happening around you at any time and sort of like at all times and make that so reliable that that it's something that you can sort of use as your primary way of of building applications. So it's really about the data that these satellites are able to generate. Oh yeah absolutely it's data and you know furthermore information you can sort of like you know try and draw the line line between but but so we are working towards a specific set of applications ourselves and then there's of course like a host of other applications that we're working with partners. What's the most exciting application? Can you give us an example of somebody who uses the data that the satellites collect? Right yeah so so the name ISI you know comes from the the idea of being able to monitor CI's and the CI's you know doesn't have sensors on it by default. So it's like you know that you know where your ship is but you don't know what's happening around you and and in order to know that in real time then you're going to need frequent enough monitoring and you're going to be in areas where there's like little or no infrastructure otherwise to support an operation. So that's an example of a sort of an operational and safety that type of a type of a use case and then there's a lot of things related to kind of the frequency and then an access of of monitoring let's say around natural disasters where you really need to be on site quickly and continue the monitoring in a sort of human activity timescale. So it's like you can have actionable information on what's happening. Well just these past few weeks in San Francisco the city's been covered with smoke because of the wildfires that have been caused by basically all of the land area around San Francisco being so dry because there hasn't been rain that large wildfires which many of you may have seen footage of in the news have been ablaze for weeks and have created so much smoke that I had to take my family out of San Francisco and ironically drive down to Los Angeles for the clean air. Now that's an example of something that's clearly connected with climate change with the warming of the climate and it's making our environment less and less stable and causing more and more of these kinds of extreme weather conditions that sometimes lead to catastrophic results and this was one of the key reasons why it was such an easy thing to understand when when we first heard you and your co-founder Rafal talk about what you plan to do because it seems so clearly connected with the kind of need that will only get stronger as we need to be more and more aware of how the environment around us is changing in real time. Can you tell me a little bit about how do you see the future? Right. So I guess like you know the important thing that already is being done extremely well by space technology and why sort of like the investment in science around space technology is extremely important and the national space agencies are doing great is the sort of macro level monitoring of the climate and macro level monitoring the effects of climate change and it's sort of like having a you know global objective understanding of the sort of long trends but the one thing that like we can bring to you know this equation is is really the sort of the the short term kind of tactical monitoring of really mitigating the effects over here so we are now developing applications towards the so like event-based flood monitoring so that like while a flood is happening you need to know in you know timescale of hours how it is progressing where is it how deep is it and where it's potentially going and this is the type of a thing that hasn't been done from space before and this is really an area where we see that like I mean it's a it's a huge impact in terms of saving you know property and saving lives but but you know how that translates into in into business is that you know there's this angle of of you know the whole insurance industry working in this sort of tactical space of understanding you know damages in that specific event so I think like we've found an angle where specifically a startup company or like a private company operating this type of capacity works really well whereas of course if we're the macro scale it really needs to be done by sort of scientific and public effort because that doesn't necessarily turn into a business case. Do you think that your data can actually help prevent catastrophes? Yeah there's a few few areas where we are working towards you know for instance being able to alert and prevent building collapses infrastructure like bridges dams and so forth. With radar you can do this thing that's called interferometry where you can see like really millimeter level shifts in in ground and for us to be able to increase the sample size into just like you know days and sub daily time series like that really helps us to get to a place that again has not been done before and really can help to like literally save lives. Is there gonna be a day when I can set up an eyesight alert on my iPhone to alert me if something's happening to my property somewhere? Oh I certainly hope so. I certainly hope so. All right well ping me when that's available because I think I need that service. Give us one, two years to be fine. Great well what do you see when you look back if you you know speaking here to many other young entrepreneurs such as yourself is there a key takeaway that you would share from your experience so far? I mean it's it's really been a rapid ride it's been it feels like these three years having just you know participated peripherally as a board member an investor the company has just kind of exploded you know it's you know it feels like a real substantial company and business now walking into your new offices and you know seeing all the screens monitoring all this data coming in. Yeah I have a real job now. That's right so what do you what would you say as you know words of advice for other aspiring entrepreneurs? I guess like one of the sort of key lessons you know through the whole journey you know has it been that like you know for us I mean it's an like it's an extremely hard industry to be in like building hardware first of all and then building hardware for space and then you know trying to solve sort of engineering problems that are sort of like you know just airing on the side of you know impossible to possible. I know I remember I mean some of the people that I called up when I was doing diligence on eyesight just you know the experts were kind of shaking their heads and saying ah that hasn't been done and we don't know it's probably not possible. Yeah yeah so it's like you know given that it's like that's like the amount of challenge is like absolutely enormous like the like the one thing that of course you know carries you forward at all times is that you're doing something that you really really really want to do and then you're really passionate about in a sense that that you know for a lot of you know our team like they are extremely good at you know the specific area of technology or space technology as a whole and you know they really want to do that and you know like personally I really want to sort of like see see this come through because like you know it's not going to be easy so like really choosing an area that you know that you know if you're not going to you know succeed in one year you're going to succeed in five years and every one of those five years you have to work every single day very hard so like you know is it going to be an area that you when you're done with all this thing you know you're like that's really what you want it to do so so you know just following that type of that type of thinking really helps. Yeah it's it's really about picking the problem that you want to work on and picking that well um if you think back now before you started I say you worked on a satellite at the university as a student the altar one which is actually now also in orbit and that's a that's a small tiny little cube set. Yeah. Did you already know at that time that you wanted to find a satellite company? Not necessarily it's actually it's a really funny funny question that like every once and a while you know we would get asked that like so how did you decide that you're gonna you know launch satellites as your business like actually like you know for us it's sort of like clipping the question that we were already building satellites when we were studying that was normal and then how did we decide to start a business was what was was the was the other question so so um uh so and you know that's of course like you know hugely part of like now for us you know we were part of this this auto satellite program that you know for us as students was already kind of normal that you know universities can do satellites it wasn't necessarily you know very normal you know just just a while ago so like you know that's just a bit of a lucky timing of course. Yeah I think that that's true in the sense that space as an industry was dominated by large traditional aerospace companies and your timing once again timing here was key because you happened to be working on cutting edge technology in an area where it suddenly became possible to build a startup company that actually launches satellites into space which really wasn't possible as a business earlier. Yeah yeah of course like the the story from satellites to building you know this radar sensor that goes into that size of a satellite you know that was the part that was sort of like you know on the side of impossible and that's of course like where it was hugely important for us to then be able to leverage the sort of you know finish governmental financing you know schemes to take us from like absolutely impossible 100% risk to like you know only 98% risk that's sort of like you know in the sort of seed stage financing for the first crazy VCs. Yeah and this is something that is shared probably by other frontier tech companies or business ideas as well is that you originally got started with the help of government financing from Finland. Yeah okay well the future seems bright for space. Yeah there's still a there's still quite a lot of work to do but but I think what's the next step for you what's what's going to happen after this. So this X2 like you know what makes that specialist is that now it has every single one of the technologies that we need to build the full constellation you know gets demonstrated within this mission. So there's going to be more satellites. So yeah so from there on out there's going to be more satellites of course every single one will be better than the previous one because we're also an engineering company but but really you know we're scaling to tens of satellites and that's really where we become you know the fastest most frequent most objective provider of data and then you know towards all these applications that really are the exciting pieces so the next couple of years will be extremely exciting for us. So next step is probably also then attracting great engineers and companies who want to build applications on top of the data that you provide. Yeah all right well hopefully there are a few of those in the audience available. Talk to us. Okay thanks Peck. All right thanks a lot. Thanks.