From EO Technology to EO Business: Turning Satellite Data into Financial Decisions

Last week our CEO Nils Helset had the privilege of joining the ESA EO Commercialisation Forum in Seville as a panellist on the session "EO for Food Security and Agriculture Monitoring."

One thing stood out across our discussion: the EO industry is very good at building technology. It's still learning how to build businesses.

At DigiFarm, we've spent five years on that second problem. Our starting point was a simple observation - field boundaries are the foundation of everything in digital agriculture: compliance, insurance, input planning, yield estimation. Yet most of the sector was still drawing them by hand.

We automated that. And then we asked: what decisions does a field boundary actually unlock?

Today our AI-enhanced Sentinel-2 imagery pipeline - producing 1m resolution from a 10m sensor - is live in 30+ countries, serving ~54 enterprise and government clients at ~95% retention. Not because the technology is impressive, but because the outputs plug directly into the workflows clients already use. API-first, no raster management, no satellite expertise required on the client side.

The panel reinforced something we believe strongly: EO delivers when it gets close to a financial decision. Crop insurance premiums. CAP compliance claims. Credit risk assessments. That proximity to money is what turns a pilot into a product.

What's next for us is even more exciting - combining high-resolution optical with thermal data to enable water stress detection at the individual field level. That's not an improvement on existing products. That's an entirely new class of parametric insurance instruments that don't exist today.

Huge thanks to Ruud Grim from Netherlands Space Agency for excellent moderation, and to fellow panellists Matieu Henry (FAO), Lorenzo Tronchin (Zespri International), and Antoine Lefebvre (Kermap) for a genuinely substantive discussion. And to Aravind Ravichandran and ESA for putting it together - the session attracted quite a crowd, which tells you the appetite for honest conversation about EO commercialisation is real.

If you’re working on agricultural intelligence, parametric insurance, climate risk modelling, or EO-enabled financial products, we’d be very interested to connect and exchange perspectives.