Terrabyte

TerraByte AI operates an "Earth Search Engine": a platform that ingests satellite imagery and global event streams and lets users retrieve matching locations through natural-language queries instead of specialist annotation and GIS tooling. A query such as "oil storage tanks near this port" returns ranked imagery tiles with latitude, longitude, capture year and a relevance score. The company describes complementary capabilities including streaming of high-resolution imagery into customer applications, predictive models for environmental trends, and alerting on changes within a defined area of interest such as wildfires or infrastructure shifts.

The product is exposed as a single JSON REST endpoint (POST /api/search at portal.terrabyte.ai/api) that also powers the company's own dashboard; authentication is via signed-in session today, with partner bearer tokens issued during onboarding and no SDK required. Stated platform characteristics include 24/7 live ingestion, more than 15 million events per day across categories such as wildfires, storms, infrastructure changes and environmental shifts, and roughly 0.4-second latency from satellite to API. Early access is requested by email, with production API keys and dashboards provisioned during onboarding.

Use cases described by the company span identifying power-line segments, finding parking lots near highways without EV charging stalls, monitoring container ships entering port or maritime chokepoints, detecting deforestation and open-pit mining, wildfire response for utilities and first responders, and insurance risk characterization such as vegetation encroachment.

Founding story

TerraByte was founded by CEO Rishi Madhok and CTO Fuxun Yu, both Microsoft veterans, who launched the company in the year preceding its May 2026 unveiling. Madhok previously led geospatial AI initiatives at Microsoft Planetary Computer, and Yu was a principal research manager at Microsoft where he led the company's Geospatial Foundational Model project [2].

Business model

TerraByte sells access to its geospatial models and search API. Its initial commercial focus is B2B enterprise licensing, with the company stating that a subscription-based model is planned as the commercial strategy matures [2]. Access is delivered through the portal API and dashboards, provisioned during onboarding [0].

Enterprise licensing today, with a stated intention to move toward subscription pricing [2].

Traction

The platform reports 24/7 live ingestion, more than 15 million daily events and about 0.4-second latency from satellite to API, with a searchable imagery archive and a demo showing similarity-search results. A single complex query in a demonstrated screenshot generated more than 2,000 filterable results identifying cargo ships, warehouses, solar farms, mining sites and deforestation areas. The company reports it is working on arrangements for an on-orbit demonstration [0][2].

Latest developments

In May 2026 TerraByte emerged from stealth to unveil its Earth Search Engine platform, disclosed pre-seed backing from Ascend, PSL Ventures and angel investors without specifying the amount, and presented at an ESA-NASA workshop on AI models for Earth observation in Huntsville, Alabama. GeekWire also references a subsequent expansion of the Earth Search Engine with a satellite imagery partnership and interactive features [2].