Danti: A startup snapshot
Sitting at the intersection of NLP & Earth Observation data
I’m back with another startup snapshot! I’m looking at Danti this week.
Problem
Academics and public intellectuals like to wax poetic about living in the “information age” and what that means in theory.
What that means practically is that there’s an immense amount of data out in the world, and about the world. However, much of this data is not particularly well-organized, and it can be difficult for people who aren’t subject matter experts in both the field and data to access and interpret it.
Solution
Danti is addressing this problem within the specific context of earth observation (EO) data.
In the startup’s own words:
Danti searches and understands the massive amounts of data being collected on Earth so anyone can access decision-making information regardless of title or expertise.
Danti has built an NLP interface to a massive EO dataset, and is essentially selling a search engine for information about the planet. The firm is working on an AI analyst to interpret their data as well.
Founders
The firm was founded by Jesse Kalman (currently CEO) and Martice Nicks (currently CTO).
Jesse earned BS and MS degrees from Georgia Tech, and started his career at Booz Allen Hamilton. From there, he held a number of roles in UAV industry advocacy groups, before moving into a business development leadership role at Airware. After that, he became an executive at Airbus, eventually leading their satellite data business. He left Airbus to work on commercialization at Xwing, a company that refitted light aircraft to fly uncrewed. He left that role to start Danti. He’s active on LinkedIn, and somewhat active on X.
Martice earned his BS degree at Full Sail University. After graduating, he worked for about two years as an analyst at Dynamic Analytics & Test, a government decision support and engineering consulting firm. From there, he spent about three years at Dispersive Solutions, doing networking, test automation, and customer support. From there, he jumped into the EO industry, landing at Maxar — where he spent nearly eight years, and ended his time at the firm as a Senior Systems Architect & Program Manager. He left Maxar to spend about a year running solutions engineering at Orbital Insight, a geospatial data analytics firm that Privateer bought last year, before founding Danti. He’s active on LinkedIn and X.
This team has fantastic founder-market fit, and a clear right to win in terms of both selling and building the service.
Market
Danti has positioned itself as a dual-use startup, in that it wants national security customers as well as commercial customers. It is doing two non-standard things in this.
First, its government sales efforts go beyond the defense and intelligence community. It’s got some early interest from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which rolls up under the Department of Homeland Security.
Second, it seems to be pursuing both segments simultaneously. Startups normally pick one vertical and start there; that Danti does not seem to be doing that is curious.
Top-down
Government
I expect that the overwhelming majority of their funding from the federal government is going to come from DoD, where the firm already has relationships with the Air Force and Space Force.
The key stakeholder in the intelligence community is the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), which handles image intelligence and GIS techniques for the Department of Defense. Danti won a competition through the National Security Innovation Network to help the agency search through its data in April 2023.
At this point, Danti’s R&D is probably advanced technology development, which is covered in the pdf of the slide deck below in Budget Activity 6.3.
This indicates that depending on whether the firm wants to market this as integrated sensing (because their product is doing sensor fusion), or trusted AI (due to the NLP interface), the pool of money that Danti could pull from to conduct R&D was potentially as much as $2.26 billion in FY 25 (the current fiscal year).
Danti didn’t get nearly that much money, but trusted AI and integrated sensing are areas the DoD is pursuing aggressively based on its funding decisions. The way the government allocates funding is an excellent indicator of what it thinks is important to develop, and to spend money on operationally in the coming years. Danti is closely aligned with that in a way that’s almost reminiscent of Palantir in its early days.
Commercial
Location Intelligence, which is another way to frame Danti’s commercial beachhead product, is a relatively well-developed market. Grand View Research says that the global TAM was $21.2 billion in 2024, and projects a CAGR of 16.8% through 2030.
Dataintelo says that the property intelligence software market is somewhat smaller. It thinks the sector was worth only $4.5 billion in 2023, and the CAGR through 2032 will be 14.5% — with an ending sector size of $15.8 billion.
Verified Markets is even more pessimistic. It valued the property intelligence software market at $3.1 billion in 2024, and projects a CAGR of 10.5% through 2033, with an ending sector valuation of $7.8 billion.
While there’s not agreement on the size of their beachhead commercial market, it seems clear that there’s growth in it. Danti could have a venture-scale outcome if the commercial side pans out, even if the government side does not.
Bottom-up
A top-down analysis of the market size is sufficient for the government market, because the funding documents I looked at show actual Congressional appropriations. The only way to do a bottom-up analysis here would be to actually look at funding on a buyer-by-buyer basis. However, for at least some of Danti’s early adopters, like the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, the entire institutional budget is classified.
On the commercial side, I’m not convinced that a bottom-up market size here would actually be meaningful, since I expect Danti’s growth inflection points going forward will be product launches for new industries.
Confidence in that combined with a lack of knowledge about what those industries will be leaves me convinced that a bottom-up market size of its beachhead commercial market, information about property, probably will not be particularly useful in evaluating the firm’s future potential.
Fundraising History
The startup was founded on February 6, 2023.
According to Pitchbook, it raised early funding from Humba Ventures (the deep tech fund in the Susa Ventures family).
Towards the end of Q1 2023, the firm raised a $2.75 million seed round led by Tech Square Ventures, with participation from Space VC, Tareyton Venture Partners, Raven One Ventures, Service Provider Capital, Radius Capital, Overline, and several angels. Around that time, the startup left stealth mode and started generating revenue.
It raised another seed round in March 2024, of $5 million. The round was led by Shield Capital, and other investors included Humba, Space VC, and Tech Square Ventures — all of which were follow-on investors. This round had a more clearly defined purpose, of deploying an AI data analyst to increase the startup’s value proposition.
Selected Competition
The competition here isn’t specific sources of EO data, as much as it is different avenues through which it might be accessed.
SkyFi is an EO data marketplace and analytics service that’s also dual-use, but seems more commercial-first.
It’s about 2 years ahead of Danti in terms of fundraising.
Blackshark.ai builds a photo-realistic, real-time, semantic 3D model of the world.
Data collectors (Albedo, HawkEye 360, etc) have their own interfaces.
More generalist Generative AI tools could potentially do this sort of thing.
I used Perplexity to test this, and could not match the quality of result I expect Danti can provide based on the website — but I am no prompt engineer, and perhaps other AI tools are better.
I could get links to some resources, but it would take a lot of prompt engineering to get to anything close to what Danti suggests it can accomplish on its promo video.
The scope where I had some success was only really at the municipality level and up.
This technology is evolving rapidly, and just because I couldn’t get Perplexity to do something today does not mean it or its competition will be unable to do the task in the future.
Technology
The technology here is a user interface, an NLP tool to interpret user queries, and then some sort of data retrieval tool.
Danti does frame the technology as a “search engine”, and I think it might be using something like Retrieval-Augmented Generation, but that’s speculative.
Danti hasn’t shared much about its specific technology implementations, and that makes it tough to talk about the details here. However, I’m encouraged by the implications of the tech being the least exciting part of this startup. I think that’s a good thing for EO data as a product of the aerospace sector.
Progress
Over two years, Danti has accomplished a good deal. It’s built an AI product that works across text search, imagery, and NLP that’s suitable for government use. The suggestion that the trial for government users is free implies that the startup is already generating revenue.
The firm’s commercial offering is in beta.
Joanna Stern, a Wall Street Journal columnist, put out a piece earlier this week entitled “I Quit Google Search for AI—and I’m Not Going Back”. I’m not sure that I’m ready to jump ship from Google just yet, but the video below from Danti’s website makes me wonder whether Google’s image search service might become obsolete before their text search service.
The startup won a Direct to Phase II SBIR award from AFWERX of $1.2 million in October 2023. SBIRs function sort of like seed funding from the government.
The more impressive government funding update was the TACFI (Tactical Funding Increase) of $1.9 million that the startup won in August 2024 from SpaceWERX. This represents the government doubling down on their interest in Danti, in a manner similar to (but not exactly like) a private investor deploying follow-on capital.
Both SBIRs and TACFIs are non-dilutive funding, but they are government contracts that come with performance obligations.
Just last month, in February 2025, Danti earned “awardable” status in Tradewinds, the DoD’s AI/ML and data solutions marketplace. My impression is that this unlocks potentially recurring operational revenue from DoD, rather than R&D contracts.
Assumptions
In order to seriously consider Danti as a potential investment candidate, I’d need to be comfortable with these key assumptions:
Danti wants to expand into other commercial sectors.
This isn’t the sort of service that the EO data providers themselves are going to invest in.
This isn’t currently a core competency for other satellite companies — I’m not worried about Wyvern taking on Danti, for example.
If all the satellite EO companies got together and decided to build a competitor together, that could be a problem.
Danti has a handle on what the next generation of EO data is going to look like, and is building tools to make it accessible.
Danti’s going to be able to build a product capable of interacting with classified EO data sources.
I think this will be critical to unlocking large operational contracts that serve DoD and the intelligence community.
Key Open Questions
If I had more time, these are the most significant questions I’d dig into.
How does Danti make money? Is it based on usage, a subscription, or something else?
What commercial markets does Danti see as most valuable, and why?
What’s Danti’s data pipeline? How close are its relationships with its own vendors?
Final Thoughts
I’m not enough of an expert at NLP to have a sense of whether or not Danti is truly deep tech in that field or not. But I think it’s a brilliant move for this domain of data, because such a big part of the problem in boosting EO adoption is buyers not really understanding what specific products will address their needs.
Danti abstracts that away very elegantly.
Moving beyond the interface, Professor Akin at the University of Maryland, who developed Akin’s Laws, includes in his list of rules about spacecraft design:
15. (Shea's Law) The ability to improve a design occurs primarily at the interfaces. This is also the prime location for screwing it up.
Danti is definitely a SaaS play more than a space play, but that doesn’t mean this quote is irrelevant. The list of investors in the firm includes an unusual mix of deep tech funds, regionally focused funds, and marketplace funds. It is very strong evidence to me that Danti is a startup building a bridge between the aerospace sector and the rest of the economy.
I think that’s incredibly exciting.
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