Satellite Vu

Satellite Vu (SatVu), founded in 2018 and headquartered in London, UK, is a thermal infrared Earth observation company building a commercial constellation of high-resolution thermal imaging satellites designed to map the heat signature of buildings, infrastructure, and industrial facilities globally — providing data for climate resilience, urban heat island monitoring, building energy efficiency assessments, industrial activity tracking, and economic intelligence applications.

SatVu's HotSat satellites carry mid-wave infrared (MWIR) and thermal infrared (TIR) sensors achieving 3.5-meter ground resolution — dramatically finer than legacy US military weather satellite thermal sensors (VIIRS at 375m or Landsat-8 TIRS at 100m) — enabling identification of heat signatures at the building level rather than city block or district level. At 3.5m resolution, it becomes possible to differentiate individual warehouses, industrial chimneys, cooling towers, and vehicle fleets based on their thermal signatures, opening applications that coarser sensors cannot support.

Key applications include: building energy performance auditing (identifying buildings with high heat loss rates for retrofit prioritization); urban heat island mapping for climate adaptation planning; industrial activity monitoring (tracking factory operational status from thermal signatures of furnaces and cooling systems); natural gas leak detection (high-temperature wellhead anomaly detection); and night-time lighting-independent economic activity tracking.

HotSat-1 launched aboard a SpaceX Transporter-8 rideshare in June 2023, providing operational thermal imagery for early customers while the company builds HotSat-2 and HotSat-3 to increase revisit frequency. SatVu has raised venture funding from investors including Seraphim Space and received UK Space Agency grant support.

SatVu competes with Satellogic (which added thermal bands), Planet Labs (limited thermal), and Maxar in the commercial EO market, differentiating through thermal-only specialization enabling best-in-class infrared sensitivity and resolution for heat monitoring applications.