Satellite imagery holds a wealth of information that could be useful for industries, science and humanitarian causes, but one big and persistent challenge with it has been a lack of effective ways to tap that disparate data for specific ends. That's created a demand for better analytics, and now, one of the startups that has been building solutions to do just that is announcing a round of funding as it gears up for expansion. Descartes Labs, a geospatial imagery analytics startup out of Santa Fe, New Mexico, is today announcing that it has closed a $20 million round of funding, money that CEO and founder Mark Johnson described to me as a bridge round ahead of the startup closing and announcing a larger growth round. The funding is being led by Union Grove Venture Partners, with Ajax Strategies, Crosslink Capital, and March Capital Partners (which led its previous round) also participating. It brings the total raised by Descartes Labs to $60 million, and while Johnson said the startup would not be disclosing its valuation, PitchBook notes that it is $220 million ($200 million pre-money in this round).

On April 20, 2010, when BP's deep-water drilling rig Deepwater Horizon exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, the oil giant claimed that the spill was just 1,000 barrels per day. A small non-profit in West Virginia, SkyTruth, studied the satellite observations of the oil slick, cataloged its computations, and concluded that the spill was at least 20 times bigger than what was being claimed. The report was quickly picked up by the media, and lead the US government to straightaway increase the estimate to 5,000 barrels of oil per day. The same year, UBS Investment Research had two teams quietly working on Wal-Mart's quarterly earnings preview – one using time-honored traditional methods, the other studying the satellite pictures of the American retail brand's parking lots to gauge the customer footfall. Each came up with a different revenue forecast.