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Ubotica aims to deepen its partnerships in the US and engage in government procurement deals, to continue deploying AI technology on satellites.
Irish space-tech company Ubotica Technologies has formed a new corporate entity in the US to expand its presence in the country.
The new entity has its headquarters in the Ohio Aerospace Institute (OAI), on the NASA Glenn Research Center Campus. Ubotica said this location is “strategic” and that it aims to deepen its partnerships with both NASA and the US defence industry.
Ubotica said the new US corporate entity will allow the company to engage in US government procurement and continue its focus of deploying AI technologies on satellites.
“Our co-location within OAI provides a great opportunity to integrate into an ecosystem at the forefront of space and aerospace innovation,” said Ubotica chair and chief commercial officer Sean Mitchell. “We are grateful to the Ohio Aerospace Institute for their support and eagerly anticipate future collaborative partnerships.”
The new HQ announcement comes one month after Ubotica struck a partnership with IBM to use its cloud infrastructure and Watson AI – IBM’s flagship natural language processing system.
Founded in 2017 and based at Dublin City University’s research and innovation campus, DCU Alpha, Ubotica’s tagline is ‘smarts for smart satellites’. The company develops hardware platforms that are designed to get AI into orbit.
The company has close links with Movidius, the AI business that was acquired by Intel in 2016. Some of Ubotica’s senior team emerged from Movidius and Ubotica’s tech was built around the Intel Movidius Myriad 2 vision processing unit.
Ubotica also has a team of computer vision engineers in Spain and Canada, and a team of space systems experts in the Netherlands.
The Dublin-based company has had an exciting couple of years. In May 2022, Ubotica raised €4m in a seed funding round led by Atlantic Bridge to help develop the next generation of its tech. Later that year, Ubotica announced a partnership with UK company Open Cosmos to bring an AI-centric satellite into orbit.
Earlier this year, Ubotica unveiled its latest hardware platform, called CogniSat-XE2, which is designed to get AI into orbit through smaller satellites, including miniature cube satellites.
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