Everyone recognizes the value of orbital imagery — and no one wants to wait any longer than they have to for it. Little Place Labs is a startup aiming to reduce the lag time between when data is collected on orbit and when it's actually useful by shifting processing from the ground to the spacecraft itself.

In a presentation on Aerospace's Space Stage at TechCrunch Disrupt, Little Place Labs chief federal strategy officer David Braithwaite explained the problem succinctly.

"Data has a half-life, and timing is everything," he said. "Whether you're looking for wildfire detection, illicit maritime activity, checking on the status of a power supply plant, or even supporting military operations, satellite imagery has to be downloaded, processed, and analyzed before you can understand what you've collected and if it's of any use to anybody. The result is a slow and expensive process that induces data latency for any kind of usable data for a decision maker."

His company makes a software product called Orbitfy, which they partner with satellite makers to host on their payloads. Raw data goes in, he says, and high-value analysis comes out.

"Orbitfy processes the images directly in the satellite, analyzes, and produces a report. It takes all this information, compiles it into one tight information file, and transmits it via inter-satellite link relay to the ground. We're able to take those insights that you normally wouldn't find out for a few hours and days with our current method and cut that down to just a few minutes."

They claim that they can reduce the downlinked data size by as much as 98% — and of course, the original imagery can still be downloaded at leisure for follow-up analyses or checks.

Little Place Labs is using its first, $3 million funding round to push Orbitfy to tech readiness level 9, and their next goal is to hit $10 million in annual revenue.

“Pushing advanced capabilities to edge systems on orbit is an ambitious undertaking, but the payoff is real," said Aerospace CTO Debra Emmons. "Anything that accelerates insight for warfighters, first responders, and decision makers is worth exploring."

Little Place Labs was awarded best pitch on stage — you can see it and the others right here.