PierSight: Building New Capabilities for Unaddressed Needs in Persistent Ocean Surveillance

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We started PierSight based on research that revealed a structural gap in global ocean surveillance.

When vessels switch off their Automatic Identification System (AIS), they go dark to operating agencies. Today, there is no single architecture that can natively identify dark ships 24/7, regardless of day, night or cloud cover. PierSight is building a persistent and seamless ocean surveillance solution - giving complete coverage, high accuracy and rapid response.

A 2022 study by Global Fishing Watch used Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 data to detect fishing vessels that were completely invisible to AIS systems.

The issue isn’t that AIS can be turned off. That’s well known.

The issue is that large areas of human and industrial activity at sea are not continuously monitored by any one system.

Coverage is fragmented.

Optical sensors are weather and daylight-limited.

Revisit times leave gaps.

If fishing vessels can operate unseen, so can tankers, cargo ships, and actors engaged in sanctions evasion, illegal trade, and Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) violations.

That structural blind spot is what PierSight was built to address.

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This problem-first philosophy has not only shaped our internal architecture decisions. It has also been externally validated.

In August 2025, PierSight was selected to build the SAR backbone for India’s first private Earth Observation constellation under the Public-Private Partnership (PPP) model. The program, designed by ISRO and IN-SPACe, consolidated requirements from multiple government departments - spanning agriculture, water resources, disaster management, and national security - into constellation-level specifications.

Persistent monitoring is no longer a theoretical requirement. It is a national-level one.

The Problem Wasn’t That Satellites Didn’t Exist - It Was That They Weren’t Designed for This

Most Earth observation satellites, whether built by national space agencies or by commercial players, are optimised for broad scientific utility.

These missions are designed to answer many questions at once: climate change, biomass, land cover, soil analysis, etc.

Missions like NISAR are powerful, multi-band systems designed to support dozens of applications, from forests to earthquakes.

That broad capability is valuable. But it comes with trade-offs:

Larger satellites

Higher power requirements

Higher development and launch costs

And most importantly, not optimized for one mission alone

The conclusion was straightforward: persistent ocean monitoring is not a generalist problem.

It’s a specialist one.

Instead of starting with a satellite and then looking for problems it might help solve, we started with the problem - persistent, continuous, all-weather detection and tracking of maritime activity - and built toward the solution.

That shift in perspective led us to a very different design philosophy.

Satellites, Yes - But Built for a Purpose

Ocean monitoring has very different requirements from imaging forests or crops. It doesn’t require massive, multi-purpose payloads or oversized power budgets. What it needs is:

Persistent coverage

High revisit rates

Weather-independent visibility

And the ability to detect targets that intentionally try to go unseen

The combination of these characteristics can only be addressed by Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR). SAR doesn’t depend on sunlight, and it penetrates through clouds. It gives you the true surface picture of the oceans, day and night.

But having SAR imagery alone isn’t enough. The true value comes from turning that imagery into actionable insights, not raw images that a human has to comb through.

This is where PierSight takes a fundamentally different path.

From Passive Observation to Active Surveillance

Most Earth observation systems are reporting tools - they document what has already happened.

A spill occurred. A collision took place. A fleet assembled.

That information is useful, but it is reactive.

We asked: what if monitoring could be active, not passive?

That requires persistence. It requires revisit times measured in hours, not days. It requires constellations, not one-offs. And critically, it requires building satellites that are designed specifically for this mission.

That focus, let us rethink the economics too.

Because we aren't building multi-purpose satellites, we can build smaller, less power-hungry, purpose-built ones. With the same capital that would fund a handful of generalist satellites, we can deploy many specialist satellites instead. That’s how you move from revisiting a location every week to revisiting it every hour.

And that’s how you start moving from after-the-fact reporting to active surveillance, where suspicious activity is detected, flagged, and triaged automatically.

Solving the Right Problem - End to End

PierSight was built to do one thing - and to do it exceptionally well.

Our entire system, from hardware to software, is designed in-house, giving us full control over how a customer’s problem is defined and solved. That intent is embedded from the very first design decision.

Because we start with the mission and work backwards, we can focus our time, effort, and capital on what actually matters: delivering persistent maritime intelligence at a fundamentally lower cost.

We don’t aim to serve every use case. We aim to solve one critical problem end-to-end.

The oceans are too vast, too dynamic, and too consequential to rely on systems that were not designed specifically for them.

Because the oceans need systems built for persistence.

And that is why PierSight exists.