Spire Global Brand Guidelines: A 2012 CubeSat Start, Lemur Satellites & the Kpler Sale

A classroom satellite that became a constellation.

Spire Global began under another name. English Wikipedia says the company was founded in June 2012 in San Francisco as NanoSatisfi, by three graduates of the International Space University — Peter Platzer, Jeroen Cappaert and Joel Spark. Its first project, ArduSat, aimed to “democratize access to space” with tiny satellites that the public could program, and it was partly paid for through a Kickstarter campaign. Early prototypes were tested under a high-altitude balloon.

The first two satellites, ArduSat-1 and ArduSat-X, each a one-unit CubeSat, were released from the Japanese Kibo module of the International Space Station on 19 November 2013. The company then moved to a larger, three-unit format and launched the first of its own standard satellites, Lemur-1, on a Dnepr rocket in June 2014. ArduSat was spun off soon afterwards to concentrate on education, and the company took the name Spire.

Manufacturing moved to Scotland early. Spire opened an office in Glasgow in February 2015, first working from Clyde Space’s premises, and opened its own clean room for building satellites there in December 2015, English Wikipedia says. The first Lemur-2 satellites flew in September 2015 on India’s PSLV-XL rocket. That launch began a company habit: employees name each satellite, and the first three were called Joel, Peter and Jeroen after the co-founders.

Weather, ships, aircraft and a stock listing.

Spire’s satellites listen rather than photograph. In January 2016 it opened a second American site, in Boulder, Colorado, to start a weather programme built on radio occultation, which uses navigation-satellite signals to measure temperature and pressure through a slice of the atmosphere. English Wikipedia says Spire joined the first round of the American weather agency NOAA’s Commercial Weather Data Pilot in September 2016. Its satellites also picked up ship-location signals, known as AIS, and from 2018 aircraft signals, known as ADS-B. In 2019 it set up Spire Maritime as a business unit in Luxembourg, and on 1 April that year launched its 100th Lemur.

Spire went public through a merger with a special-purpose acquisition company, NavSight Holdings. The agreement was announced on 1 March 2021, and Spire’s shares began trading on the New York Stock Exchange on 17 August 2021, under the ticker SPIR.

The maritime business was later sold. English Wikipedia says that on 13 November 2024 Spire announced the sale of its ship-tracking business to Kpler, the Belgian data company, while keeping its satellites and infrastructure. The deal was slow to finish: the World Ports Organization news site reported on 28 April 2025 that Spire had sued Kpler in a Delaware court over its failure to close. Spire said it completed the sale on 25 April 2025, and the same report noted that Britain’s Competition and Markets Authority was then reviewing the transaction, with the two businesses run separately in the meantime.

Since then the company has added factories. Its datelines give its base as Vienna, Virginia. On 7 May 2026 it announced a satellite manufacturing facility in Munich, with a clean room, first used for satellites in the EURIALO project, supported by the European Space Agency, which aims to locate aircraft from their radio emissions. On 2 October 2026 it said the first three satellites built at its Boulder facility had launched on SpaceX’s Transporter-18 rideshare mission. The chief executive, Theresa Condor, said the company now had production in America as well as in Britain and Europe.

Imagery, radar and data from orbit.

Earth-observation companies sell something most customers never see being made. Their satellites are small, distant and short-lived, so the brand has to be carried by what comes back: the picture, the signal and the map. The companies in this guide build or operate satellites that take optical photographs, record radar echoes, or listen for radio signals from ships, aircraft and the atmosphere, and most of them now describe themselves as data or intelligence businesses rather than satellite makers.

Their public image leans on a few recurring scenes. Crisp overhead views of ports, farmland and city grids show what optical satellites can see from orbit. Radar companies favour grainy, false-colour textures in which water turns dark and buildings glow, because radar images look nothing like photographs. Small satellites appear on clean-room benches under bright light, handled by staff in gowns and gloves, as proof that the hardware is real and made in-house.

On their websites the satellite often gives way to the screen. Maps, dashboards, map layers and charts present the data as something a customer can open and use, and product names tend to describe a platform, a feed or a service rather than a spacecraft. Many of these firms sell to governments and defence ministries as well as to farming, shipping, insurance and mapping businesses, so their language swings between mission and market.

The trade meets at shows such as the GEOINT Symposium in the United States and the European Space Agency’s Living Planet Symposium in Europe, where launches, contracts and new image products are announced. This guide sets out what can be checked about each company — who founded it, who owns it now, where its satellites are built — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Data first, satellites second.

Spire’s brand puts the data ahead of the hardware. Its website opens with the line “Turning space data into actionable insights” and calls Spire “a data and intelligence company that collects and processes data from space.” It says it designs, builds and operates its own satellites, ground stations and software. Its press releases describe a constellation that observes Earth “using radio frequency technology,” supplying weather intelligence, ship and plane movements, and the detection of signal spoofing and jamming. A further line of business, which it calls Space as a Service, lets other organisations put their own instruments on Spire-built satellites.

The name in daily use is short: the website and releases say “Spire,” while the listed company is Spire Global, Inc. The satellites keep their Lemur family name and their staff-chosen nicknames, a small piece of company culture that English Wikipedia records from the first Lemur-2 launch in 2015.

Two points help readers keep the record straight. First, the ship-tracking data business that Spire built up from 2019 passed to Kpler in April 2025, so Spire Maritime services now belong to Kpler, though English Wikipedia says Spire’s American government maritime clients stayed with Spire. Second, the word “Spire” is shared by many unrelated businesses, among them Spire Healthcare, the British hospital group; the satellite company’s website is spire.com.

For a design guide, Spire Global shows how a company can brand itself on what its satellites hear — weather profiles, ship and aircraft signals — rather than on pictures, and how a classroom satellite project grew into a listed data company with factories on two continents. Compare Planet, another San Francisco company built on fleets of small satellites, and ICEYE, the Finnish radar-satellite company. For this guide we use a deep teal and a signal coral with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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