Space is not the problem. Space is generous. Bandwidth is stingy. Every day satellites capture oceans, borders, crops, cities, and about 98% of that Earth observation data never makes it back to the ground in time to matter. It floats there, priceless and unusable, like a symphony with no speakers. The bottleneck is not imagination. It is downlink, and downlink does not care how advanced your satellite is if it cannot get the data home.
The Compression Company looked at that silence and heard opportunity. Michael Stanway, Co Founder and CEO, and Joe Griffith, Co Founder and CTO, met studying neurotechnology at Imperial College London. One was keeping brain tissue alive outside the body, wrestling with massive imaging datasets. The other was studying how the brain compresses information through neural networks. They realized the brain had already solved a problem space was still fighting. Founded in 2025 through Entrepreneur First and now operating across the UK and the San Francisco Bay Area, they built a software defined AI compression layer that runs on orbital GPUs and on the ground, turning existing compute into leverage instead of asking operators to redesign hardware.
Their platform reduces Earth observation file sizes by over 95% using sensor specific intelligence rather than generic codecs. It understands that empty ocean and a moving ship are not equal. It compresses low value regions like cloud cover more aggressively while preserving critical detail in infrastructure and strategic assets. The result is more usable data within the same transmission window, lower storage and transmission costs, and faster delivery to customers who make decisions in real time. They have already shipped their first orbital deployment, going live in the first quarter, proving this is software operating in space.
Long Journey led the $3.4M pre seed round, joined by Ludlow Ventures, Forward Deployed Venture Capital, Entrepreneurs First, Transpose Platform, Fractal Capital, and Ventures Together. The funding will expand the engineering team, support commercial rollouts with satellite operators, and advance the vision of building a compression factory for all data types, starting with Earth observation and generalizing across sensors and missions.
The takeaway is sharp. In a world investing billions in constellations, the constraint is throughput. Unlocking the 98% of data that never reaches Earth in time changes the economics of defense, climate monitoring, disaster response, and infrastructure mapping. Congratulations to Michael Stanway and Joe Griffith for raising $3.4M to widen the narrowest pipe in space, because when more truth reaches the ground, the value of everything already in orbit multiplies.
