Ubotica has seen a ‘significant demand’ for its maritime intelligence platform over the past year, it said.

Irish space-tech Ubotica has raised $11m for its AI-powered platform used in maritime security, as countries around the world arm themselves with the latest to watch over their waters.

The round was led by Act Venture Capital and Greencode Ventures, with participation from existing investor Atlantic Bridge.

Ubotica offers satellites that make real-time decisions using AI. It has deployed more than 30 Earth observation models so far, ran “hundreds of thousands” of AI inferences and achieved a 100pc mission success rate, the company said.

The latest raise will be directed toward Ubotica’s live maritime intelligence platform, which enables governments and maritime agencies to detect emerging threats to critical infrastructure, including to undersea communications cables and offshore energy assets, across vast maritime territories in real time.

It works by combining orbital AI with autonomous ground-to-orbit tasking, to focus the available sensors on emerging activity, rather than relying on fixed satellite collection schedules and post-processing on Earth. Ubotica wants to bring the technology to market at scale.

The company has seen a “significant demand” for its maritime intelligence platform over the past year, it said, driven by Ubotica’s ability to enhance maritime surveillance across exclusive economic zones that are much larger than a nation’s landmass.

“Ubotica has spent years pioneering orbital AI, and we have applied that knowledge to one of the hardest security challenges on Earth – protecting vast maritime zones and critical offshore infrastructure,” said Fintan Buckley, the CEO of Ubotica Technologies.

“Live maritime intelligence predicts where risk is emerging, tasks the right satellites and sensors, and delivers decision-grade intelligence in minutes, giving security teams the speed and efficiency they need to act.”

Ubotica is a frequent collaborator with NASA and the European Space Agency, having delivered the first spacecraft to autonomously identify a target ahead and reorient itself to capture it.

Last month, the company announced a partnership with Texas-based Novi to combine its AI platform with Novi’s smart-satellite constellation to process Earth observation data directly onboard satellites.

“Ubotica has been running inference in orbit for years and transforms static Earth observation into live intelligence,” said Andrew O’Neill, principal at Act Venture Capital. O’Neill is also on Ubotica’s board.

“Nations can’t afford to wait hours for imagery while a vessel goes dark over critical infrastructure. Live maritime intelligence proves what on-board intelligence is worth – it turns Earth observation from a camera into a real-time sentinel, starting with Europe’s waters.”

Ubotica bagged the SpaceNews Icon Award for Space AI Partnership last December, alongside NASA JPL and Open Cosmos.

In April, the start-up announced a partnership with NASA for a test mission to demonstrate autonomous intelligent satellite networks.

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