Geospatial tech firm gets private equity backing

Private equity firm Antarctica Capital has acquired majority ownership of Descartes Labs, a provider of geospatial intelligence to government agencies and enterprises in certain commercial markets.

Terms of the transaction announced Thursday were not disclosed. Antarctica Capital operating partners Richard Davis and Graeme Shaw have respectively been appointed as CEO and chief operating officer.

Santa Fe, New Mexico-headquartered Descartes Labs bases its offerings in cloud computing environments so users can more quickly acquire geospatial and remote sensing data.

Descartes touts its products as being able to help federal users acquire, stabilize and fuse data from multiple sources in order to gain insights and help predict events before they take place.

A team of scientists from Los Alamos National Laboratory founded Descartes in 2014 to help agencies tackle the problems they face in applying large-scale computing, artificial intelligence and satellite imagery into their programs.