Why Orbital Sentry?
Why would we start Orbital Sentry? Why now? In these tumultuous times where AI is upheaving the job market and earth observation is struggling to grow as hoped, why would we take such a risk in quitting our jobs and starting a company? I’ll give you three reasons why this was the right call:
What we are doing matters. We are not building a cool satellite and hoping to find a problem to solve– we started with a pressing need and used our deep tech expertise to develop a unique solution that scales to additional industries. Wildfire is a $100B+ problem that is only getting worse. Every metric points to that fact and while there are a host of new, innovative solutions on the horizon, nothing provides the realtime persistent data needed to holistically combat the threat. Live-streaming the Earth in the infrared will serve as the thread to weave together the patchwork solutions in wildfire and amplify every tool’s value. Beyond wildfire, our defense and intelligence value is a game-changer. Overhead Persistent Infrared (OPIR) is an essential tool for national security and one that is ripe for revolution. Persistent time series data will feed AI foundation models in ways that have been heretofore impossible. Orbital Sentry has the potential to save lives and that is a reason to gamble. As I have now told everyone in my pitches, I like to work on things that matter. You are never going to find me optimizing app widget efficiency by 0.3% for big tech— that is not my calling in life, nor the calling of my two co-founders. We have built our careers out of solving meaningful and hard problems
This is a dream team. In life you rarely get to work with a single person you admire, let alone your entire team. My cofounders are elite- Keith has built some of the most exquisite space systems ever launched and Elizabeth has brought to market incredible EO capabilities in some of the most difficult verticals. Even more lucky- they are my friends. We push each other daily to do better and I learn from them in every conversation. We balance each other too and in our collective strengths we have already adjusted and improved our approach. Critically, we share an aggressively pragmatic view of the world. Put that together with a team of Advisors who have insane credentials and care about us and our company, man, that cannot be beat.
No one else is going to do it. While we have only been all-in since last summer, we have learned we are definitely it. There is no other company planning to build what we are building. It is why we are coming out of stealth mode-- we want to broadcast our ambitious plans. This is a hard problem and it will be a challenge to pull it off. But hard problems are the ones worth solving. Not only is our approach to persistence from GEO entirely new in the commercial space, but so is our business model to leverage a consortium for wildfire. As one seasoned space VC told us: “this is the first genuinely new idea I have heard in a long time.” To break the logjam of flat wildfire funding and inconsistent data, we have to be bold and we have to be the ones to build it.
We are excited about what Orbital Sentry is going to bring to the fight and we know it will result in a sea change in earth observation. I can’t wait to make this happen and look forward to sharing the ups and downs along the way.
-Mark Keremedjiev, CEO
Image source: Colorized NASA VIIRS image over the western US, January 12, 2026
