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Spire Global flies a fleet of small satellites that track weather, ships, and planes, and sells the data to companies and governments.
Spire Global is a space company that makes its money by looking down at Earth. It builds and launches a constellation of small satellites — roughly the size of a microwave — that listen to signals and snap pictures of the planet. Those satellites track things like weather patterns, the movements of ships at sea, and the paths of airplanes, and the company sells that data to businesses and governments that need to know what's happening in the sky and on the oceans.
The business has three main flavors. Its weather data helps forecasters and insurers predict storms and plan around them. Its ship-tracking service tells ports, traders, and navies where vessels are and where they're headed, which matters for everything from shipping schedules to catching illegal fishing. And its aviation tracking follows planes, useful for airlines, airports, and defense customers. Spire also sells "space as a service" — it lets other organizations piggyback their own sensors or software onto its satellites and ground stations, so a customer can get a view from orbit without building a space program. Customers pay Spire subscriptions for this stream of data, often under multi-year contracts with governments and large companies. Spire's edge is that it owns the whole stack — the satellites, the ground stations, and the software that turns raw signals into useful information — which lets it sell a service rather than just hardware. The catch is that space is expensive: launching and maintaining satellites eats cash, and the company has historically lost money as it races to grow. Competitors include other satellite-data firms like Planet Labs and ICEYE, plus free or cheaper alternatives from governments. Spire went public in 2021 by merging with a blank-check company, a path that many space startups took and that left several of them with bruised share prices. Revenue has been climbing, but the company has had to work hard on costs and profitability. It also announced a deal in 2025 to sell its commercial ship-tracking business to Kpler, a signal that management is trimming to focus on weather, aviation, and the space-services side. The big question for investors is whether Spire can turn its genuinely useful orbital data into steady profits before the cash runs thin — a classic space-business tension between grand ambition and the monthly bills.
Saved answer · last researched 22 Oct 2026
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