Forest analytics software company Intelescope Solutions has raised $8.3 million. The company utilizes drone and satellite imagery to transform the massive forestry industry. Intelescope provides clients such as pension funds, timber REITs, TIMOs, hedge funds, forestry land owners/managers/consultants with automated services at speeds of 50-100x faster than those of current processing techniques. This enables more efficient management and a richer knowledge of timber assets.
The company was founded in 2009 by chairman Steven Schlussel and Bert Cohen. Ofer Tal was appointed CEO in January. With a team of 30 professionals, the company's long term goals are to develop big data for forestry with predictive analytics to optimize and preserve global forests. Similar to big data giant Palantir, Intelescope is looking at big data to support human decisions, improve efficiencies, and effectiveness. With R&D offices based in Petah Tikva, the company recently opened a new headquarters in Stanford, Connecticut.
Schlussel said, "We have already shown success with some of the largest, leading forestry players and look forward to helping our customers continue improving productivity through automation, which prior to the application of our advanced forestry analytics services, was a distant and unattainable concept."
Forests today cover 31% of the earth's land mass and produce wood products valued at over $500 billion per year. Yet, much of the forestry industry has yet to reap the benefits of broader advances in technology. During the last six years Intelescope has developed substantial intellectual property assets that clearly establish its global technology leadership. The company has caught on with the forestry community. Many of the leading forestry companies in the US, Canada, Brazil, Australia, South Africa, Indonesia, India, and China utilize Intelescope services. Plum Creek Timber, the largest private landowner in the US has adopted Intelescope's iRow service commercially to improve their pine plantations' inventory.
Contributing to Intelescope's success has been the emergence and advancements of both the satellite and commercial drone industries. Satellite imagery today is essentially available worldwide with constantly improving image resolution, allowing Intelescope's forest analytic services to cover massive amounts of land, at minimal costs. Commercial drones cover less area, however, produce extremely high-resolution imagery which enables Intelescope to identify individual young trees. Similar to the evolvement of marketing techniques, such as Google Analytics that now enable you to identify individual leads, our individual tree detection boosts the granularity of forest analytics. The combination of satellite and drone imagery platforms allow Intelescope to analyze the earth's surface cost effectively.
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes-online.com - on March 26, 2015
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