When creating images of the Earth from above, satellites, drones, aircraft and spacecraft often come to mind. But a startup called Near Space Lab is taking a very different approach to taking high-resolution photos from high school.

Near Space Laboratory is building aircraft raised by helium balloons, then relying on airflow to stay up late, walking around to take photos from the stratosphere and eventually sliding down to Earth. Against the backdrop of a massive appeal of using its images with customers, the startup has now raised $20 million to expand its business.

Bold Capital Partners, a venture capital firm founded by Peter Diamandis of Xprize and Singularity University Fame, is leading the B Series. Strategic supporters USAA (American Automobile Association) are also investing with Climate Capital, Gaingels, River Park Ventures, and previous Backers Crosslink Capital, Third Sphere, Draper Associates, and others. Near Space Labs has now raised more than $40 million, including $13 million Series A for 2021.

The startup is the creativity of Rema Matevosyan (CEO), Ignasi Lluch (CTO) and Albert Caubet (Chief Engineer) – all three people worked in space, physics and research, before starting the company.

Matevosyan is an Armenian, growing up in what she calls a "very technical" family of physicists, programmers and amateur astronomers. After studying mathematics as an undergraduate in Yerevan, she moved to Moscow to attend graduate school, where she first met Lluch, who studied from Spain.

Both were considered to be the MIT in Russia at the time. Indeed, around 2017, the institute was a joint venture with MIT to fill that ambition.

It was through this relationship that the three applied it in New York to an accelerator called Urban-X. Matevosyan found living in America in her preferences and now she runs the company from there.

If you float around the Earth about the ones that are close to space to better understand what is happening below, there is a metaphor in the description of Near Space and its founder.

The partnership between the Skolkovo Institute and MIT ended in February 2022, one of the byproducts of the escalated sanctions against Russia after the Ukrainian invasion. Meanwhile, the Urban-X accelerator was shut down by its main supporter BMW this year.

However, the near space is still here and is growing.

Matevosyan said one of the startup’s largest customer areas to date is the insurance industry, which has subscribed to images from close-range space to track and understand the impact of large-scale disasters such as fires and hurricanes. (USAA is a major insurance company and financial services provider, as well as its other activities for motorists of military, veterans and their families.)

Currently, near space covers only specific areas in the United States, but plans to expand. This can be done relatively easily, Matevosyan said, because the company does not require special permission to fly—its Swift aircraft is "powered" only by balloons, requires only windflow, and can be unmanned along the stratosphere.

The startup aims to cover 80% of the U.S. population twice with its 7cm image. It can be done in a few hours and can take 800,000 drones for days or weeks to execute, close-range claims.

The company will also develop a more customized coverage plan for customers and says the plan will be tailored to the operations of the end user.

These users are now mainly in the insurance sector, but some of the funds will also be used to explore opportunities in other segments. Matevosyan believes that agriculture is an area where a startup may have opportunities.

She said many farms of all sizes are trying to use drones to determine the status of their crops, but this is not scalable because it is not accurate enough. “The drone is doing a small amount of sampling and inference, but it is not actually falling off because if a piece of land is unhealthy, it doesn’t necessarily mean the rest of the farm is unhealthy.” It’s too costly to use drones to investigate everything, and satellites can’t provide those possible customers with sufficient resolution at the right cost.

Military uses are an area that is obviously a use case, but the near space has not yet pursued this opportunity. Matevosyan describes Swift as "dual-purpose" and may include a limited amount of payload. But she said the company hasn't done anything other than commercial use cases.

Given the direction of the world moving and geopolitical climate, it is interesting to see if this is still the case for a technology that seems extremely versatile and relatively inexpensive.

Still, this versatility is one of the reasons why investors are so interested.

"The idea of ​​low-cost aerial imagery is valuable to many political parties, not just insurance," said Bold's chief Will Borthwick. “It’s a moment even when you consider the emergence of AI (which requires timely, high-quality data to work properly.”