Mr Wheelhouse, said: “Bird-i is an impressive example of an innovative small business and I’m delighted that Scottish Enterprise has been able to support the company’s growth with an RSA grant of £210,000, which will help create 14 new jobs in Glasgow.
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“Small and medium sized enterprises are the lifeblood of Scotland’s economy, and businesses like Bird-i are helping to develop the digital skills talent we have here, as well as increasing our pool of specialists in new technologies, and we are keen to support their aspirations to expand their business.
“Bird.i’s close ties with the world’s leading satellite operators – Airbus and Digital Globe –bring a real international focus on the digital skills base here in Scotland and our capabilities in data analytics and that is something I very much welcome.”
Founded in 2016 by Corentin Guillo, a French entrepreneur with a background in Earth observation satellite development, Bird.i provides both cutting-edge imaging and intelligence services. The company collates the best satellite, airborne and drone imagery every day, in order to build up a high quality, accurate view of the changing world. By applying proprietary artificial intelligence and computer vision techniques such as unsupervised learning or similarity search to their unique imagery and data, Bird.i extracts actionable insights, better, faster and at a much greater scale than trained human eyes to answer a range of business needs, issues and questions.
A wide variety of companies can benefit from Bird.i’s services, across a diverse range of sectors. Current case studies in the construction and infrastructure industries include detecting new construction sites or tracking the location and progress of ongoing building projects over a specific period of time. Examples related to financial services include measuring the crude oil storage at the tank, refinery or country level in real-time; as well as monitoring the transportation of commodities, such as grain, in order to build a picture of supply and demand.
Corentin Guillo, Bird.i CEO and Founder said: “The establishment of Bird.i in Scotland following the completion of a first investment round was a bold decision which has been motivated by the access to local talents and the support from the Scottish Government. This RSA funding will help to establish further Bird.i’s presence in the Scottish ecosystem and become an employer of choice.”
Rhona Allison, interim managing director for company growth and innovation at Scottish Enterprise, said: “This expansion represents an exciting step forward in the evolution of Bird.i. Scottish Enterprise is delighted to have supported the company at each stage of its development from initial strategy and management planning though the High Growth Ventures team, to equity investment and ongoing account management support. We look forward to working with Bird.i as it continues to work towards achieving its ambitious growth plans.”
