By: Payload Space | Jacqueline Feldscher & Jack Kuhr | June 29, 2023
Ken Campbell, a former Navy EOD officer and the newly-tapped head of Edgybee’s US arm, told Payload that it was an “easy decision” to come out of retirement to work with Edgybees because he believes the company’s tech can be a game-changer in the hands of more defense and intelligence customers.
Edgybees 101: The Israeli-based company is working to seamlessly integrate data and images from different sources, such as satellites, aircraft, and drones to give customers the most accurate data in real time.
By linking landmarks to precise GPS coordinates that will remain the same if the data is collected by different platforms or on different days, the technology also allows information, like maps or building tags, to be layered over images, Edgybees CEO Shay Har-Noy told Payload.
Use cases: The technology will be especially useful to defense and intelligence clients, according to Har-Noy and Campbell, though it could also help state-level officials looking to track flooding or wildfires.
Targeting is an obvious use for the technology within defense circles. “We say, this corner of the building is at this GPS coordinate, hard stop, and it’s locked,” Har-Noy said. “It’s the same building you’re talking about, it’s not the neighbor.”
It will also allow drone pilots to view more information, including road maps, broader satellite imagery, and an intel report on where schools or hospitals are located, overlaid on a single screen, he said.
Land of the bee: The company opened a new US entity last month specifically to boost its relationship with the government and defense sectors.
“My portfolio is primarily designed to demonstrate [the] value proposition to the intelligence community and DoD, but also to DHS and at a certain level even state and local consumers,” Campbell told Payload. “What we provide them is one pane of glass. We’re getting rid of all those screens and…enriching it with other data right there on the same screen.”
Drone of the brave: There are multiple internal stories of how Edgybees got its unique name. The company started off using drones to be augmented reality video games before pivoting to space, and some thought the drones looked like bees that were angry and/or edgy. But Campbell said he heard that one of the company’s drones flew through a beehive while on a mission in Israel and came back “loaded with pissed off bees.”