A Canadian startup working at the cutting edge of satellite imagery has raised $4.5 million across a combination of a seed round and pre-seed funding. Wyvern is working on hyperspectral imager that captures light across many different wavelengths, including non-visible ones.
Wyvern participated in a demo day at the Creative Destruction Lab back in 2019. Since then, the startup has made some significant moves beyond just the funding, including growing to a total of 18 employees and bringing on Christine Tovee. Wyvern is going to launch its first satellites this year.
Christopher Robson, co-founder and CEO of Wyvern, said that launch is the next big thing. This is going to be the first set of imagery products. The first step is going to be getting some super high-resolution hyperspectral. We won't see the super high resolution stuff for another couple of years, but when it arrives, it will be pretty great and game changing.
Wyvern believes that making hyperspectral imagery accessible to commercial customers will open up opportunities for entirely new businesses and industries to emerge. The chemical makeup of the scene it captures can be provided by hyperspectral imagery.
The lead investor in the seed round, MaC Venture Capital, recognized the immense potential for hyperspectral, and it was clear from the start that Adrian Fenty was a perfect match for the company.
He said that they hit it off from the first meeting. Both of our teams worked well together. MaC has had previous space investments, and they were very bullish about the space market, which appealed to us. They were very strategic in the sense that they could connect us to a lot of different customers and investors through investments in the space, as well as in some of our customer markets.
Wyvern added to its strategic advantage with the recent hire of Tovee, a team of young entrepreneurs, engineers and scientists. I was told by Robson that the key leadership team member came onboard.
He said that Christine had been on the technical board of advisors. We built a strong relationship with her. I think we enjoyed working with one another, and there was a lot of respect between Christine and the team. We realized that we need some kind of veteran industry expertise on our executive team to understand how we can play in that part of the space industry. It's a fantastic addition to the tech strategy.
Tovee joins the company as another female senior leader in an industry where gender diversity is woefully underrepresented. Callie Lissinna, co-founder and COO of Wyvern, told me that that has been a priority for the startup, and that it has served them well in conversations with investors and potential team members.
She said that investors mentioned how unique the team is in the space industry for having a 50/50 gender diverse founding team and around a 34% female executive team. We have had students say they like the diversity on our founding team or in our company, and that really flows through to our hiring and recruitment. That seems to be an attractive factor for both talent recruitment and investors.
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