ICEYE and OroraTech Team Up on Wildfire Data

Two European satellite companies are joining forces to follow wildfires from the first hotspot to the last damaged building. Finland’s ICEYE, which runs radar satellites, and Munich-based OroraTech, which runs thermal satellites, announced a partnership on 22 October that combines the two kinds of data in one service.

The idea is that heat sensors spot a fire early and track its front, while radar sees through smoke and cloud to show what has been damaged. The companies say the service is for governments, insurers and utilities. They have not named any customers, prices or a launch date, and the only performance claim they make is their own.

In brief

What happened: ICEYE and OroraTech will integrate OroraTech’s thermal satellite data with ICEYE’s synthetic aperture radar (SAR) to cover a wildfire from detection to recovery. Why it matters: Fire agencies, utilities and insurers often work from separate data sources; the companies pitch one shared timeline of an event. What’s next: No price, customer or availability date has been given.

What each satellite type adds

OroraTech’s thermal satellites look for heat. According to the joint release on OroraTech’s site, they provide “early detection and ongoing monitoring of active fires, including during the day and at night, identifying initial hotspots and tracking the active fire front as an event progresses”.

ICEYE’s synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellites bounce radio waves off the ground, so they are not blocked by smoke or darkness. The companies say they provide “observations through smoke, clouds and darkness to determine building-level impacts even while an event is still underway”.

ICEYE already offered wildfire damage assessments. The release calls the deal “a significant expansion” of that offering, saying OroraTech’s data “extends that visibility earlier in an event, from the initial ignition and evolving fire front through impact”.

“Wildfires are dynamic events, and the intelligence decision-makers need to evolve with them,” said Will Panchaud, senior director of product management, solutions at ICEYE.

Dr Ignacio Zuleta, OroraTech’s chief technology and product officer, said: “The earlier organizations can detect and understand a wildfire, the more time they have to make informed decisions as conditions evolve.”

Who the companies say it is for

The release lists specific uses. For governments and emergency services: pre-positioning resources, refining evacuation priorities, coordinating agencies and “substantiating disaster declarations”. For utilities: understanding threats to the grid. For insurers: “exposure monitoring, claims triage, reserve setting and adjuster deployment”.

The companies single out the “wildland-urban interface”, where fires move between forest, homes and infrastructure. They say the service was “specifically designed to replace siloed workflows with a shared event timeline”.

The companies behind it

OroraTech, founded in 2018, said on 2 October that its FOREST-20 launch took its network to 20 satellites in orbit, with the new satellite still to be commissioned. It has offices in the US, Canada, Greece, Australia and Brazil.

ICEYE describes its SAR fleet as the world’s largest and lists customers in defence and intelligence as well as environmental monitoring, insurance and emergency management. TSN covered its letter of intent with Nokia on Ukraine’s satellite links earlier this week; that deal is separate from this one.

The only speed claim is the companies’ own

The boldest line in the release is this: “Damage assessments support disaster declarations within 24 hours instead of weeks.” The release gives no example event, no customer and no comparison method behind it. Nor does it say how quickly a fire must be detected, how small a fire the thermal satellites can see, or how often the radar satellites pass over a given area.

The release also says evacuations “are ordered based on observed fire progression, not model predictions”. That describes how the companies expect the data to be used, not a decision any authority has taken with it.

For a public body or insurer weighing the service, the claims are a starting point for a trial, not evidence. Until a named agency or insurer reports how the joint data performed in a real fire season, the partnership is a product plan with two credible suppliers behind it. Tools such as Vaisala’s AI lightning forecasts face the same test: a promise of earlier warning needs published results.

Insurers’ uses raise data questions the release leaves open

Insurers are one of the three customer groups named, and the listed uses include “claims triage” and “reserve setting”. Those are decisions that affect policyholders directly. Building-level damage maps could speed up payouts, but they could also be used to decide which claims get a closer look first.

The release does not say how the data would be shared, who would own the damage assessments, or whether property owners could see the imagery used about their homes. Those are standard questions for any data used in claims decisions, and they matter more when the data come from space and cover whole neighbourhoods rather than a single property that an adjuster has visited.

Utilities and emergency managers face a simpler question: how the joint data fit with feeds they already use. Open approaches, such as Ai2’s free OlmoEarth satellite embeddings, show another route to wider access, though they serve a different purpose from live fire tracking.

What comes next

Neither company has said when the joint capability will be available, what it will cost or who has signed up. The first named customer, and the first real fire it is used on, will show whether the combined data live up to the pitch. More stories are on TSN’s Tech for Good hub.

“By bringing that intelligence together with ICEYE’s SAR capabilities, we can help decision-makers maintain a more continuous understanding of a wildfire,” Zuleta said. The next fire season in either hemisphere will be the place to check.