Czech startup Zaitra teaches satellites to warn of disasters fast

The Brno startup Zaitra, co-founded by Marek Marušin, wants to cut the path from a satellite image to a hazard warning from hours and days to a single second. An AI device is already operating in orbit and delivers its analysis in 17 minutes.

Marušin presented the project at the Forbes Next Big Thing conference in Brno. He illustrated the problem with two examples. At Christmas 2024, the tanker Eagle S dragged its anchor along the seabed, tearing the Estlink 2 electricity cable between Finland and Estonia and damaging other communication lines. The damage exceeded EUR 60 million (almost CZK 1.5 billion). According to Marušin, signs of danger were in the data several days before the incident, but they did not reach people in time. The second example: Russian MiG-31K aircraft carrying Kinzhal missiles, which trigger large-scale air raid alerts in Ukraine. Satellite images capture the preparations for takeoff at the airfield several hours ahead, but if they are decoded too late, the chance to warn is lost. “We look at the world in the past tense,” Marušin said.

What is the problem. It comes down to physics and data volume. A satellite in low orbit circles the Earth in about 90 minutes and collects hundreds of gigabytes, but it can only communicate with a ground station briefly, while passing over it. By the time the data reaches Earth and is analysed, hours or sometimes days have passed. For monitoring long-term changes in the landscape this is not a problem, but in a fire or an impending flood, waiting can be very costly.

Zaitra’s solution. The idea is to process images where they are captured. “If it is hard for us to deliver data from space to Earth, why not move the analytics into space?” Marušin explained. A small AI device is installed on the satellite and analyses the data in flight. Instead of hundreds of gigabytes, a brief message of a few kilobytes goes down to Earth, saying what was detected. “We believe this device can save lives and billions,” he said.

What this will bring. Fast messages from space could be useful in a wide range of situations: a tanker moving suspiciously near undersea cables, a military aircraft preparing for takeoff, a methane leak. Satellites will be able to recognise signs of illegal fishing, wildfires in their early stages or accumulations of water that could flood the surrounding area.

The goal: one second. The device, developed in Czechia, is already operating in orbit. “We have gone from hours or days to seventeen minutes. This year we want to reach ten minutes, and next year one minute,” Marušin said. Zaitra’s long-term goal is a delay of under a second. At present, operators sell data suited to mapping and monitoring long-term change. Zaitra wants to open a fundamentally new market in which moving objects and threats can be tracked in real time. “We are building eyes that look at the real world right now, so that we can predict the future,” was how Marušin, Zaitra’s chief executive, described the company’s ambition.

By the Around Prague newsroom