Maxar Extends 3D Geospatial Capabilities through Partnership with Blackshark.ai

Maxar Technologies has announced its strategic investment in Blackshark.ai, a leading provider of AI-powered geospatial analytics services. Maxar is a provider of comprehensive space solutions and secure, precise geospatial intelligence. The partnership represents Maxar’s commitment to innovation within its 3D Earth Intelligence product portfolio.

The Blackshark.ai platform processes petabytes of satellite imagery in hours, and it detects and segments objects, roads, vegetation and other infrastructure on the surface of the planet without human intervention. This semantic information is used to create a comprehensive 3D digital model of the world.

3D Digital Twin in Video-game Quality

The strategic investment in Blackshark allows Maxar to bring additional 3D capabilities to broader markets for more customers and opens up a new revenue stream from Blackshark. Blackshark.ai will leverage Maxar’s global cloudless satellite imagery basemap, Vivid, to create a highly performant and photo-realistic 3D map for enterprise and government customers in industries such as gaming, metaverse, simulation and mixed reality environments who may not need the global accuracy of Maxar’s full Precision3D suite. For example, this type of offering would enable flight simulator customers to access immersive 3D digital experiences with low latency and global scale.

“We’re excited to partner with Blackshark.ai to extend our geospatial analytics offering and bring a triple-A video-game-quality 3D digital twin of our planet to market,” said Dan Nord, Maxar senior vice president and general manager of Enterprise Earth Intelligence. “By integrating our industry-leading Vivid basemap with Blackshark algorithms, we expand our customer set by complementing our high-accuracy Precision3D portfolio with this lighter weight, visually stunning option.”

Michael Putz, founder and CEO of Blackshark.ai, said: “The combination of our offerings positions us to create a digital twin of our planet as real as it gets. We cannot wait to see our customers and partners using this to disrupt many industries.”