When the next SpaceX rocket shoots skyward from a California launch pad this weekend, it’ll be carrying half a dozen satellites that are meant to be the core of Vancouver-based EarthDaily’s business for the next decade.

The company did not start out expecting to gather its own fine-grained data for its Earth observation products, said chief executive Don Osborne. “​​We kind of backed ourselves into building satellites. It was not the intent originally to do that.”

The usual way of observing Earth from space is to point a satellite’s cameras and sensors at particular things. EarthDaily plans to have its satellites shoot images, in multiple wavelengths, of all of Earth’s land from the same angles every day. The company will compile those images in ever-growing stacks and use machine learning to look for even the subtlest day-to-day changes—things nobody knows they should be monitoring yet.

This fine-grained tracking (and, eventually, prediction) has uses in agriculture, mining, science, insurance and defence.

“We have about a $72-million backlog of data which we’ve pre-sold,” Osborne said.

EarthDaily is an unusual startup. It has about 240 employees and locations around the world. It has bought existing firms that already did Earth-observation analysis to build a customer base, but is only now on the verge of living up to its reason for being.

It got this far because it didn’t start in a garage with money borrowed from friends and family. New York-based private equity firm Antarctica Capital founded EarthDaily in 2021, based on assets from defunct Vancouver company UrtheCast, with Osborne—a former MDA and UrtheCast executive—at the helm. At the time, he said, the intent was that the company would crunch imagery gathered by other people’s satellites.

That raw material turned out not to be good enough. Data from numerous sources inherently has a lot of noise. A spot on the ground that looks different from one image to the next could mean absolutely nothing.

“It’s just a different satellite, different sensor, different day, different sun angle, different time of day, all those things,” Osborne said.

EarthDaily decided it would need its own eyes in the sky.

The company contracted U.S.-based Loft to put custom satellites together, including components from Canadian firms INO and Xiphos. The Canadian content was a nice happenstance but not something the U.S. private-equity money cared about, said Osborne—“We did not pick them, despite what people think, because they’re Canadian. We picked them because they’re the best at doing what they do.”

A first trial satellite went up in June 2025 and deployed successfully. After this weekend’s launch of six, three more are to follow.

Fifteen years ago, none of this would have been feasible, Osborne said. You’d have needed a space the size of an arena for servers to hold the 100 terabytes of data that the company expects to bring in each day, and the humans needed to look for differences between day to day images would have filled the stands.

“We would have priced that out, and we would have looked at each other and said, ‘Well, that’s a dead business, because we’ll never finance that,’” he said. Cloud computing and artificial intelligence have changed the game.

It’s still an expensive proposition. Besides Antarctica’s money, EarthDaily has taken in US$60 million in financing from Arizona’s Trinity Capital. And it had once planned to have its satellite constellation functioning by 2023.

One frustration, said Osborne, is that despite having “great engagement” with the federal government, EarthDaily doesn’t have a lot of business with it; the company has secured a handful of federal contracts over the years, adding up to single-digit millions. Unlike commercial customers, governments generally won’t take any chances on buying goods or services that aren’t yet available.

Such committed business is essentially an asset a firm can take to a bank and get financing against. “There’s been less of that than I’d like,” said Osborne. But he’s hopeful.

The satellite launch is scheduled right before midnight local time on Saturday. It’ll be just the first of a sequence of heart-in-throat moments—the satellites deploying from the rocket, each making its way to its orbit, their parts all turning on. But if they all go as intended, Osborne said, EarthDaily hopes to have something to show even the most skeptical buyer by early fall.