Messium

Messium is a London-based precision-agriculture startup, incorporated as Messium Ltd on 5 May 2023, that uses AI models applied to commercial hyperspectral satellite imagery to assess nitrogen levels in crops. Its platform is designed to tell farmers when, where and how much fertiliser to apply, aiming to cut fertiliser waste and input costs while protecting yield, rather than relying on blanket, field-wide application rates. Messium does not own or operate its own satellites; instead it licenses imaging capacity from commercial Earth-observation providers including Wyvern, Planet, Pixxel, Open Cosmos and Esper, combining that data with its own crop-nitrogen modelling.

In September 2025 the company announced a £3.3 million seed round led by the UK Innovation & Science Seed Fund and Expansion Aerospace Ventures, with participation from Mudcake, Laconia, GRDC GrainInnovate, Clear Current Capital, Moonstone Venture Capital and SuperSeed. As of 2024 Messium had already raised £1.4 million in pre-seed funding and received about £350,000 in equity-free UK grant funding, and the company has said it is open to joint-venture satellite launches with data-provider partners as it scales.

Messium is led by CEO George Marangos-Gilks, who has framed the company's goal as eliminating fertiliser guesswork for farmers globally in order to raise yields and cut agricultural waste. The company had roughly 11 to 50 employees as of its most recent funding disclosure. Because Messium is a downstream user of satellite Earth-observation data rather than a satellite operator or manufacturer, its space-sector relevance comes through its reliance on, and commercial relationships with, multiple small-satellite imaging operators.