WASHINGTON ― As Colorado-based Vantor works to transform from its legacy as a satellite imagery provider under its progenitor Maxar Technologies to what it calls a spatial intelligence company with a focus on national security, it also is increasingly expanding its reach into the booming international market, according to senior company officials.
“We’ve seen the geopolitical shift in the marketplace dramatically change in the last 16 months, and that has been based on a lot of the US position in regards to intelligence sharing and/or capability sharing, and really asking the world to invest more as a percentage of GDP on their own capabilities. And the international community has embraced that,” CEO Dan Smoot told Breaking Defense.
Until recently, he explained, there has been a “massive gap” in understanding among US allies and partners about the “value” of geospatial intelligence (GEOINT) due to the fact that “the US supplied so much of that for so many years.”
And while Vantor’s domestic market includes a large swathe of non-defense government customers of remote sensing for activities like disaster response along with its national security base, its international revenue primary comes from the defense sector.
“In the international community, [it’s] kind of 70-30: 70 percent probably on the defense side; 30 percent on the civil side,” Smoot said.
Just in the last month, Vantor has inked two deals with European partners focused on the defense and national intelligence community marketplace.
On June 24, it announced a deal with UK aerospace technology firm BAE Systems for BAE to build the first two of its next-generation Vantor Vantage electro-optical imaging satellites with a 20 centimeter resolution.
Smoot said the deal covers the first two sats but it could grow to a larger constellation on the order of Vantor’s current WorldView Legion, which includes six birds in low Earth orbit.
According to BAE’s press release, “The companies will continue to research future collaboration on satellite constellation design and production to advance national defense and intelligence capabilities.”
On June 18, Vantor and German defense behemoth Rheinmetall signed off on a new joint venture to provide geospatial intelligence to the German Ministry of Defence.
The joint venture will allow the Bundeswehr to automate integration of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) data from a wide variety of third-party sensor into 3D maps and other products, explained Tomi Maxted, Vantor’s director of corporate and brand communications.
Specifically, he said, this includes fuzing Vantor’s optical imagery with synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery provided by Finnish satellite operator ICEYE ― which also recently signed a deal with Rheinmetall focused on both German MoD and the European ISR market.
Maxted explained that one of the reasons Vantor has been able to stay above the current geopolitical currents in Europe driving a push for space “strategic autonomy” is that it is “one of the only companies that can deploy these capabilities in classified” formats to integrate with national security data processing systems.
Smoot said that Vantor builds sovereign facilities that provide “direct access” to its current and archived imagery database via “air-gapped environments” rather than going through commercial networks.
“It’s their data, [and] their data does not leave their environments,” he said. “And more importantly, when they task it, it maintains with them, and we’ve proven that over and over again that US government can’t impact that.”
Further, Smoot said, a number of governments outside the US have come to realize over the past year and a half that they lack the money to build — and more importantly the capabilities to actually use data from — their own military ISR constellations. Thus, he said, there is a shift in the international market towards buying ISR data, intelligence products and the ground systems needed to bring those products to users in an understandable form as a service from commercial providers.
To meet this demand, Vantor has been evolving its Tensorglobe software platform to automate the entire process of creating spatial intelligence from tasking to data integration to disseminating information, Smoot said.
In that vein, the company also today announced its new WorldView 3D as an extension of Tensorglobe’s capabilities. The software products integrate Vantor’s satellite tasking capabilities, “AI-powered production software,” and it’s 3D spatial database that “includes more than 100 million square kilometers of the world mapped at GPS-level accuracy,” the announcement said.
WorldView 3D has two modalities, according to Vantor: a rapid 3D mode designed for “time sensitive missions where the terrain conditions can change quickly” and imagery is delivered within 24 hours of capture; and high-definition 3D, which provides “detailed 3D maps[.]”
Maxted said Vantor’s focus on platforms and ground systems puts the company “in a different part of the value chain than some of our competitors, because our competitors are offering hardware and data” rather than geospatial intelligence platforms and infrastructure.
Smoot summed up that from Vantor’s “top line perspective … it’s not just about geographic expansion [or] customer expansion, it’s also about, vertical marketing expansion, software application expansion.”
