exactEarth

exactEarth (now part of Spire Global following Spire's 2021 acquisition) was a Cambridge, Ontario-based Canadian company and pioneer in satellite-based Automatic Identification System (AIS) ship tracking, providing global real-time vessel monitoring data to maritime authorities, navies, coast guards, shipping companies, and commodity traders.

AIS is a VHF radio transponder system mandated by the International Maritime Organization (IMO) for all commercial vessels over 300 gross tons, originally designed for collision avoidance — but satellites in LEO can receive AIS signals from vessels anywhere on the ocean surface, creating global maritime domain awareness impossible with terrestrial receivers. exactEarth launched a constellation of AIS-receiving satellites and built the data processing infrastructure to aggregate, deduplicate, and deliver global vessel positions with update frequencies of minutes to hours depending on orbit altitude and constellation size.

The company's data served shipping intelligence platforms (Lloyd's Intelligence, MarineTraffic), maritime law enforcement agencies monitoring vessel behavior for piracy, illegal fishing, and sanctions evasion, national navies tracking military and commercial vessel movements, and commodity trading desks using vessel movement data to predict oil tanker and bulk carrier flows before official statistics are released. exactEarth's acquisition by Spire Global in August 2021 for CAD $170M combined exactEarth's maritime domain awareness expertise with Spire's broader Earth observation and weather satellite data business, creating a more comprehensive satellite data intelligence platform. The combined entity competes with ORBCOMM, Hawkeye 360, and government satellite surveillance programs in the global maritime tracking market.