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G42 and ICEYE Sign a Memorandum of Understanding to Collaborate and Develop Advanced SAR Products

November 17, 2021

 G42, and ICEYE have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to collaborate on developing advanced SAR products. 

The collaboration was formalized at a signing ceremony by Talal Al Kaissi, VP of the G42 Space Program and Jamil Kawar, Director of Global Sales at ICEYE, on the sidelines of the Dubai Airshow.

The agreement between the companies will bring together ICEYE’s existing satellite constellation and solutions and G42’s geospatial analytics, cloud computing, and AI capabilities for customers in the UAE and beyond. ICEYE’s provision of both historical and future SAR imagery and G42 through its AI research arm, the Inception Institute of Artificial Intelligence (IIAI), will jointly develop advanced algorithms and analytics with ICEYE to serve local customers in various fields. Bayanat, G42’s geospatial products and services company will benefit by providing these solutions to customers in various domains including oil & gas, municipalities, maritime, environment, disaster management, public safety, and other areas. Additionally, ICEYE will also deploy its cloud-based Near Real Time (NRT) SAR processing capabilities on G42 Cloud to enhance G42’s geospatial analytics platform.

G42 recently signed an agreement with Yahsat to bring together a powerful combination of advanced space technology and satellite communications expertise with AI and Big Data. The agreement between G42 and ICEYE promises to augment that objective and provide a holistic offering to end users, as well as enhance the UAE’s position as a key destination for world-class space companies looking to serve this market and potentially jointly develop future satellites in-country. 

ICEYE operates the world’s largest commercial constellation of SAR satellites and has launched 14 spacecraft so far. The company is planning to further expand its constellation with at least four additional satellites by mid-2022, with the objective of reaching an average access time of three hours anywhere on the globe.

Talal Al Kaissi, VP of the G42 Space Program said, “The combination of ICEYE's near real-time image acquisition capability coupled with G42’s advanced AI, cloud, and supercomputing capabilities, presents a compelling offering to end-users that require actionable intelligence in a digestible format to enable swift decision making. There are a multitude of new use cases in a variety of different industries that can benefit from such products, and we plan to leverage our ecosystem partners in collaboration with ICEYE to unlock these markets.”

Jamil Kawar, Director of Global Sales at ICEYE said, “This is truly a ground-breaking collaboration for ICEYE and it’s a first major step in the Middle East region for our increasingly growing company. I’d like to thank the G42 organization for the trust they have put in our ICEYE team and we eagerly look forward to further cementing the great collaboration between both our companies moving forward.”