Spacetech startup, Pixxel has announced the close of its $7.3 million seed round with new investors Omnivore and Techstars joining alongside previous investors Lightspeed Ventures, Blume Ventures, growX, and others. The Bengaluru-based startup had already raised close to $5 million in August, last year from existing investors as a part of its ongoing seed round. It has closed the round now with an additional $2.3 million.

The company is expected to deploy the funds from this round to launch its first set of hyperspectral imaging sensors into space before June, this year, as well as begin commercialization of its software platform with clients in Europe and Africa. The funds will also be used to build manufacturing capabilities for its next set of constellation satellites, it plans to launch into space by 2023. Pixel plans to launch close to 30 satellites in space embedded with its imaging sensors, over the next two years, company founder and chief executive, Awais Ahmed told Mint. Along with this, the company is already in talks to raise another $15 million – $30 million as part of its Series A round, in the next few months, after the launch of its first satellite in space.

“Our new funding enables us to build a health monitor for the planet through the most advanced hyperspectral small-satellites. These hyperspectral satellites will allow society to tackle many of humanity’s most pressing issues and we believe they will become the holy grail of remote sensing – providing the best combination of spatial, temporal, and spectral resolutions to date,” said Ahmed. Two-year-old, Pixxel is a hyperspectral imaging startup, a technology that can analyze a wide spectrum of light in an image, instead of just assigning primary colors (red, green, blue) to each pixel. This allows richer data and more information to be derived from a particular image.