Spire's 100-plus satellites cover just about any point above Earth, blanketing the planet in radio frequency signals to track ships, aircraft and even natural phenomena. Working together, the satellites peer across vast swaths of territory. Each individual satellite's signals are enhanced as they join forces with others, unlike visual satellites that each must have larger camera apertures to improve resolution.
So it's no surprise that outside of the new Spire partnership, insurance companies and their providers are literally moving into space to provide better products. In a recent blog post, spatial intelligence company Otus Intel said such partnerships are particularly useful for natural disasters affecting a large swath of population, or monitoring large-scale infrastructure such as dams.
And Spire says the potential for its new partnership, whose financial terms are not disclosed, gives rise to many potential new products for Concirrus customers.
"More and more industries are realizing the value proposition of this type of data," said CEO Peter Platzer in response to an e-mail question about what types of insurance products could be possible.
"Our satellites provide proprietary data to this sector specifically for insurance asset tracking, search and rescue, and detailed global monitoring with a deeply increased awareness," he added. "We are creating proprietary tools for a new kind of data-based predictive prevention, forecasting, and business modeling built from firmware for the Earth."
Spire promises that the partnership will make data a "prime enabler" for maritime insurance performance, where the company already has extensive experience tracking signals from ships that automatically broadcast information such as the vessels' destination port and home country.
Concirrus' Graham Libaert, director of alliances, stated his company plans to integrate the data sources from Spire into Concirrus core machine learning models for its pricing, underwriting and risk management.
Privately held Spire — a veteran of multiple funding rounds whose eight-figure revenues are growing in triple figures year-over-year — has announced several data partnerships in past weeks, including a maritime safety agreement earlier this month.