Imperial College London Founders Raise €2.8 M For The Compression Company Satellite data Platform

The company is developing AI-powered compression technology that operates directly onboard satellites, reportedly shrinking file sizes by more than 95% and allowing satellites to transmit significantly more data to Earth during brief ground-station contact windows.

The round was led by Long Journey, an early investor in SpaceX, Uber, and Anduril. The newly secured funding will support the expansion of the company’s engineering team and accelerate commercial deployments with satellite operators.

Founded in 2025, The Compression Company develops AI-powered compression technology that improves the storage and transmission of Earth observation and geospatial data.

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Its platform reduces data size both onboard satellites and on the ground, allowing operators to send much more information back to Earth despite limited bandwidth. By focusing on the most valuable parts of each image, the technology helps lower costs, reduce delays, and deliver usable data faster without changing existing workflows.

“AI compression unlocks a huge opportunity with Earth Observation data. Operators have always had to make trade-offs about what gets sent,” adds Joe Griffith, CTO of The Compression Company. “When more of the data you collect can actually make it to the ground, those trade-offs change and you can be far more selective about what you throw away, and far more ambitious about the services you build on top.”

The company was founded by Michael Stanway (CEO) and Joe Griffith (CTO), who met while studying neurotechnology at Imperial College London. Stanway researched methods to keep brain tissue alive outside the body, which required managing very large imaging datasets. Griffith studied how the brain compresses information and developed neural network-based data compression techniques. He later left his PhD to co-found the company after both founders realised the same technology could solve data challenges beyond neuroscience, particularly in space.

The company was launched through Entrepreneurs First, gained strong early traction, and has completed its first orbital deployment, which is expected to go live in Q1 2026.

According to The Compression Company, the amount of data generated in space is rapidly increasing. The European Union’s Copernicus Sentinel satellites alone produce around 20 terabytes of data every day, while major commercial constellations generate several times more. Over the next decade, more than 5,400 additional Earth observation satellites are expected to launch, nearly tripling the number launched in the previous ten years.

Each new satellite collects vast amounts of imagery and sensor data about Earth. This data supports important applications such as climate monitoring, disaster response, defence, agriculture, and global logistics. However, transmitting that data back to Earth remains a major challenge.

Satellites operate with limited bandwidth and usually have only a few minutes to transmit data when passing over a ground station. Because of this restriction, only about 2% of the data captured by satellites is successfully transmitted to Earth. The rest is delayed, reduced in quality, or discarded, despite the high cost of collecting it.

The Compression Company addresses this problem by compressing data directly onboard satellites while maintaining accuracy and usability. Instead of applying uniform compression, the platform uses selective compression within each image. For example, cloud cover which makes up nearly 60% of satellite imagery and provides limited value is compressed more heavily.

“There’s been huge investments in capturing more data from space, but far less attention paid to how that data actually gets back to Earth,” says Michael Stanway, co-founder and CEO of The Compression Company. “Until now, the answer has been to launch more satellites. We’re taking a different approach using software to compress data in orbit, so operators can bring down more useful information from existing satellites and unlock more value from the data they’re already capturing.”