About our company;
Ignitos Space is Zambia’s first Space Tech Company that democratizes Satellite Earth Observation Data to improve decision-making in the economy. Our initial focus is on 4 pillars; agriculture, water resources, climate change, and disaster mitigation.
“You can’t manage what you can’t measure” (Peter Druker).
Lack of data has been the inhibitor of development and behind many unresolved challenges.
Most Space companies on the continent provide upstream solutions, for satellites and sensors, but we are unique by providing downstream solutions. Our focus is on the farmers, the small-scale and rural farmers particularly, followed by the rest of the farmers, NGOs, and government institutions.
Our proprietary IgniteAi platform is an Artificial Intelligence platform that aggregates satellite and earth observation data from various providers into one platform that makes it affordable and easily accessible to all stakeholders. The majority of farmers are tech-illiterate, our solution takes away the hassle of knowing the technical details, and with a click of a button or dial of a short code (USSD), we can triangulate the location and give key data points about soil composition, moisture levels, water stress, fertilizer and crop recommendations, and other data points.
58% of Zambia’s land is tillable, while only 15% is under cultivation. 80% of farmers in Zambia are small-scale and rural farmers, and they have no access to essential data that can help them know what to plant, where, when, and how. In Zambia alone, that is about 4 million farmers. The problem of lack of data keeps yields low, and even risks the loss of crops, equating to a loss of revenue and even livelihood. Our innovation aims to close that gap by providing essential affordable data to farmers directly and through cooperatives, farmer’s unions, and others. Our opportunity spurs from the lack of downstream solutions in Zambia that can be obtained in an easy and affordable method.
Our main market is rural and small-scale farmers in Zambia who are living on less than $2 PPP a day. While we will be servicing other market segments, like bigger farms, NGOs, institutions, and governments, but still our USP is the USSD platform to reach the market segment that can’t afford smartphones and doesn’t even have internet connectivity in most cases.
We have been working with international partners, who helped us have access to various satellite data, using that data we are creating different algorithms to be used on our platform once we develop it. Some of these solutions are present in other countries, but not curated for Zambia, and not provided through our platform which makes it accessible and affordable to the mass market. From SentinelHub to Maxxar, Skywatch, and EOS, we have taken data points in Zambia and conducted research that is already being used in some institutions and farms. Our team has now grown through collaborations with the head of departments in various universities, to an international board of advisors, to a local team of agronomists, engineers, and data scientists, all working in harmony to make our solution ready before the end of the year. We have won multiple international competitions (Paris, Kenya, South Africa, COP27 in Egypt) and gotten into two prestigious fellowships and acceleration programs (Halcyon Fellows). As well as we got recognition from the government of Zambia and currently working on a PPP together.
Our dynamic team comprises professionals who have done the required job in the past. From the founders who successfully ran tech startups to management who ran companies before and worked with farmers and Agro companies. To engineers who made apps and USSD platforms commercially, to data scientists and agronomists who worked with similar data and projects before, and to space lawyers. To an advisory board including local and international professionals and gurus in multiple fields. The whole team is coming together to put all those various skills towards a single goal: to save Life on Earth using Space.
