These awards mark a significant step in expanding the NRO’s access to cutting-edge multi-phenomenology remote sensing capabilities, including electrooptical (EO), hyperspectral imaging (HSI), and radio frequency (RF) to enhance NRO’s intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance mission. The SCE CSO represents a flexible, industry-aligned acquisition model designed to rapidly integrate commercial technologies such as EO, HSI, radar, RF, and Light Detection and Ranging.

Building on the success of prior SCE efforts, this initiative features a rolling five-year proposal window, enabling the NRO to engage a diverse range of providers—including emerging startups and non-traditional innovators—without fixed deadlines. These partnerships accelerate the delivery of operational capabilities to the NRO and its interagency partners, ensuring resilience and adaptability in a rapidly evolving global landscape.

“These awards underscore the NRO’s commitment to leveraging the best of commercial innovation to stay ahead of emerging challenges,” said Pete Muend, director of the NRO’s Commercial Systems Program Office. “By combining multi-phenomenology data from providers like EarthDaily, ICEYE, and Pixxel, we can deliver more comprehensive, timely insights for national security, environmental monitoring, disaster response, and humanitarian efforts.”

Commercial providers receiving awards include EarthDaily for daily global EO coverage, ICEYE for RF capabilities, and Pixxel for HSI. These selections highlight NRO’s commitment to dismantling traditional barriers and fostering efficient pathways for industry engagement. An alternate acquisition approach to Broad Agency Announcements, CSOs can be used to acquire innovative commercial items, technologies, or services that directly meet NRO requirements. The first NRO CSO contract awards were announced Feb. 10. The CSO complements existing SCE Broad Agency Announcements and does not replace them, instead expanding the NRO’s toolkit for agile acquisitions. Budget permitting, the NRO anticipates additional awards later in 2026 to further diversify its multi-phenomenology portfolio and address evolving mission gaps.

Source: NRO

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Through this partnership, Aechelon’s SkyBeam AI exploitation system visually fuses ICEYE’s SAR detections of changes and objects on the ground with Vantor’s highly accurate, global-scale 3D spatial foundation—which is updated continuously to reflect the operational terrain—to create a mission-ready synthetic environment. This integration unlocks 24/7, all-weather updates to Project Orbion’s living 3D environment.

“Aechelon and Vantor have sustained a decades-long partnership—we’ve been continuously integrating Vantor’s high-resolution imagery and advanced 3D data into our products and delivering them at scale across a range of defense programs,” said Nacho Sanz-Pastor, co-founder and chief executive officer (CEO) of Aechelon Technology Inc. “This marks the first integration of Vantor’s software-enabled spatial intelligence capabilities with Project Orbion, expanding the roster of industry leaders we’ve brought together to advance next-generation geospatial intelligence.”

Vantor’s 3D spatial foundation includes 3D terrain and 3D building footprints covering over 95% of Earth’s landmass and is accurate to within 3 meters in all dimensions. It is kept continuously up to date by Vantor’s industry-leading imaging satellite constellation—which can revisit the same location on Earth up to 15 times per day—and is delivered to the SkyBeam environment via Vantor’s Tensorglobe spatial intelligence platform.

Project Orbion represents the industry’s first AI-enabled Digital Twin of the Earth—a continuously updated, sensor-fused 3D environment that integrates satellite imagery, radar intelligence, photogrammetry, and real-time detections into a single exploitable picture.

The proof of concept highlights Aechelon’s open AI exploitation environment capable of fusing heterogeneous geospatial sources. The system uses Aechelon’s AI algorithms to extract detailed 3D vegetation and process Vantor building footprints for 3D models. Aechelon’s dynamic moving models then correlate ICEYE SAR detections, transforming them into precise, real-time 3D representations against a fused, high-fidelity terrain backdrop.

Aechelon AI also enhances Vantor imagery and elevation data through machine learning–based environmental modeling, including real-time snow accumulation synchronized with ICEYE SAR satellite passes, further refining the visual fidelity and elevation accuracy.

Aechelon’s overall system is enabling operators to interactively visualize moving targets and new structures or others changes with high accuracy.

Together, Aechelon, Vantor, ICEYE, and Project Orbion advance Aechelon’s mission to deliver next-generation geospatial intelligence—providing U.S. and allied forces with correlated, high-fidelity, mission-ready synthetic environments. Beyond defense, the initiative supports disaster response, emergency management, and autonomous AI system training.

Source: Aechelon

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The Detect & Classify product bundles ICEYE imagery with SATIM’s AI-based imagery derivatives, delivering both the SAR image and detections and classifications of objects in the image in a single, high-confidence package.
This product delivers a new level of rapid situational awareness across maritime, air, and land domains, providing powerful support to SAR analysts and their missions within the armed forces and intelligence agencies. This product launch follows a successful joint development effort between ICEYE and SATIM.

The Detect & Classify product, brought to market by ICEYE and powered by Satim’s AI capabilities, responds to a longstanding challenge with manual SAR data analysis. Traditionally, defense and intelligence organizations have relied on time-consuming manual analyses of imagery by SAR experts to extract valuable intelligence. Detect & Classify empowers SAR imagery users – no longer just SAR experts – to shorten this cycle by automating the delivery of actionable insights about what the imagery captures. ICEYE routinely delivers imagery within hours or in some cases minutes, and the Detect & Classify derivatives are delivered on the same timelines.

Intelligence analysts can now more quickly establish patterns of behavior in larger volumes of imagery; tactical teams can rapidly locate and classify assets for targeting, and maritime forces can more effectively identify and intercept illicit “dark vessels.”

“Combining SATIM’s extensive object catalog with ICEYE’s high-fidelity SAR imagery creates a powerful product that eliminates manual analysis bottlenecks and provides customers with direct access to actionable intelligence, improving situational awareness and accelerating critical decisions. We’ve seen significant uptake of our products with customers around the globe, and this product will expand this benefit to a wider range of customers,” said Jacek Strzelczyk, CEO and co-founder, SATIM.

“Our goal with Detect & Classify is to empower our customers to make faster, more informed decisions with less effort. This is more than just an analytics tool — we’re eliminating a bottleneck between satellite imagery pixels and decision-making, giving our users near-instant situational awareness. And it’s a transformative step on the path towards ‘lights-out,’ machine-driven satellite imaging operations. That’s a fundamental shift for defense, security, and intelligence operations that use satellite imagery,” said John Cartwright, senior VP of data product at ICEYE.

Source: SATIM

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The companies will combine ICEYE’s industry-leading satellite imagery with SATIM’s cutting-edge AI-powered imagery analytics solutions into new products enabling prompt, high-confidence detection and classification of vessels, aircraft, and land vehicles. After an initial pilot phase, the partners plan to release a series of generally available products in 2025.

”At SATIM, we continue to set the standards in AI-powered SAR analytics, and our collaboration with ICEYE, a leading SAR imagery provider, is an important milestone in our pursuit of excellence. This partnership marks a significant step in our commitment to advancing space-based solutions that provide critical insights for those on Earth. As we continue to explore new ways to advance the field, this partnership represents an exciting step ahead, and we look forward to what lies ahead in this evolving landscape,” said Jacek Strzelczyk, CEO and co-founder of SATIM.

“Our partnership with SATIM is an important step on our journey towards becoming the global source of truth. By combining our world-leading SAR imagery and capabilities with SATIM’s powerful AI-powered SAR image analytics, we will be able to serve our customers with easy, direct access to actionable intelligence and insights. Improving situational awareness with satellite-based intelligence will enable informed and rapid decision-making where it is needed the most,” said Rafal Modrzewski, CEO and co-founder of ICEYE.

Source: ICEYE

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The funding round extension included participation from funds managed by Solidium Oy, BlackRock, Seraphim, Plio Limited, and Christo Georgiev. The financing consists of a mix of debt and equity instruments and will increase investment in further developing ICEYE’s leading SAR satellite constellation, its intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) platform, and related systems. The extension brings the total amount raised in 2024 to $158M. In total, ICEYE has raised over $500M to date.

ICEYE has achieved considerable growth during the past years and the investment announced today enables ICEYE to continue expanding its ISR capabilities to serve a global customer base while further cementing its market-leading position in the new space ecosystem.

Susan Repo, CFO at ICEYE, said, “ICEYE has experienced unwavering momentum over the past few years. This extension of our growth funding round further bolsters ICEYE’s investment in its capabilities and enables us to respond even better to the growing demand for space-based technology in the global defense and ISR markets.”

Source: ICEYE

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NGA and ICEYE will conduct experiments to explore commercial synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellite imaging modes and provide new technology for missions such as safety of navigation, international security, climate security and protection of natural resources. NGA’s research interests lie in remote sensing of polar regions and sensing natural hazards worldwide.

ICEYE, NGA and other Department of Defense stakeholders will complete five research tasks through a variety of overhead remote sensing experiments. The collaborative research will include subsidence time-series mapping, automated monitoring, coherent change detection and bathymetric retrieval to produce new information for iceberg detection and tracking, mapping of complex environmental conditions such as deforestation or permafrost thaw and border security.

This CRADA will allow NGA to access a large constellation of commercial satellites, enabling R&D collaboration and dynamic SAR tasking for persistent monitoring to support critical NGA missions, according to NGA Research Director Cindy Daniell, Ph.D., who recently visited ICEYE’s North American headquarters to meet the team and see the facility and operations firsthand.

“Government and industry need a regular dialogue to understand one another’s objectives, processes and challenges, so we can address top national security threats together,” said Daniell. “This agreement lets us do exactly that—it helps us understand how commercial SAR data can support geospatial intelligence, and simultaneously, increases ICEYE’s awareness of our most pressing challenges.”

Through its Research component, NGA manages more than 70 active CRADAs, which are low-risk, flexible agreements that allow NGA to work with commercial industry, universities and other non-federal entities on joint research and development projects for national security. CRADAs enable federal laboratories like NGA to collaborate with non-federal entities by providing personnel, services, facilities, equipment, intellectual property and other resources, but not funding. In turn, the non-federal entities may provide funds, personnel, services, facilities, equipment, intellectual property and other resources.

Source: NGA

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“We are very pleased with the response to the first focus area under our new BAA,” said Dr. Chris Scolese, NRO director, who announced the release of the BAA acquisition just three months ago. “We know that users across the National System for Geospatial Intelligence are eager to explore commercial radar, and these contracts will allow us to rapidly validate capabilities and the benefits to the national mission.”

The Strategic Commercial Enhancements BAA Framework is designed to reach across disciplines and the global commercial remote sensing market to drive innovation, explore new phenomenologies, and ultimately, to ensure that the U.S. government has access to the best available commercial remote sensing capabilities.

“Consistent with the NRO’s commitment to a more agile acquisition process for commercial capabilities, this procurement was conducted quickly and efficiently,” noted Pete Muend, director of the NRO’s Commercial Systems Program Office. “We were able to issue the request for proposal, receive and evaluate the responses, and award these contracts in just over three months.”

Muend emphasized that while the new commercial radar contracts are constructed with low barriers to entry to accommodate emerging providers, they can quickly be scaled to much higher values as mission value, customer requirements, and on-orbit provider capabilities are confirmed. This latest award demonstrates the NRO’s continued commitment to a diversified architecture comprised of national and commercial satellites, large and small constellations, working across multiple orbits.

“By leveraging commercial capabilities to the maximum extent possible, we are delivering increased flexibility and capacity, greater responsiveness, and improved resiliency for our customers,” added Muend.

The NRO anticipates that the next BAA focus area will be issued later this year.

Source: NRO

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This joint R&D effort will explore low-cost, on-orbit, synthetic-aperture radar (SAR) related concepts. The areas of interest include exploration of cost-effective SAR systems including imagery tasking and uplink, SAR satellite downlink and ground station(s), image processing, and image dissemination as these abilities relate to U.S. Army and other DoD requirements more broadly. Emphasis will be placed on significant data latency reduction between the sensor and the shooter, as well as interfacing with the U.S. Army’s current Common Ground Terminal (CGT) and the future Tactical Intelligence Targeting Access Node (TITAN), a mobile ground station system that’s currently under development.

“The U.S Army is looking for affordable and versatile SAR and other advanced sensor technology to enhance its many systems and missions. High-quality, frequent-revisit commercial SAR is particularly important to us because it enables day-night, all-weather imaging and complements national satellite systems,” said Colonel Matt Anderson, SMDC’s Space Directorate leader.

“It’s our privilege to be the U.S. Army’s mission partner in this cooperative R&D effort,” said Eric Jensen, president of ICEYE U.S. “We look forward to working closely with SMDTC as we bring ICEYE’s first-of-its-kind capability to a variety of U.S. Army experiments and demonstrations.”

Noted Jerry Welsh, CEO of ICEYE U.S., “We are proud to be manufacturing, launching, and operating our satellites in the United States, where we are delivering on our commitments and earning the trust of defense, civil, intelligence, and commercial customers.”

At any given time, most of the Earth is covered in clouds or darkness. Unlike traditional Earth observation satellites, ICEYE’s small radar imaging satellites can form high-resolution images of areas of the Earth in daylight, at night, and through cloud cover. In other words, they can “see” any part of the Earth multiple times a day. ICEYE’s satellites can collect images over very wide areas as well as spot collects over specific sites anywhere in the world. ICEYE has successfully launched 14 spacecraft to date and operates the world’s largest fleet of commercial SAR satellites.

Source: ICEYE

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“Having just opened our U.S. subsidiary, ICEYE U.S. is on a fast-track in providing services that will help the public sector,” said Mike Lyons, CEO of ICEYE U.S. “DIUx is tackling some of the nation’s most challenging problems, and we’re eager to provide them with data support services that will help in solving those problems.”

The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) launched DIUx in 2015 to build a bridge between commercial technological innovation and national security endeavors. Headquartered in Silicon Valley with offices in Boston, Austin, and the Pentagon, DIUx facilitates DoD’s efforts to identify and work with commercial companies, including ICEYE U.S., to help solve national defense problems.

Earlier this year, ICEYE announced its expansion into the U.S. with an entity focused on delivering EO data in long-form to its current and prospective clients. ICEYE U.S. is also developing data analytics capabilities to support more varied industry specific services.

Source: ICEYE

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