How Blue Sky Analytics CEO Kshitij Purwar grew Blue Sky Analytics to $201.4K revenue and 8 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is abelasha parwar she's a fulbright scholar yale alum having 10 plus years of work experience in private equity big data analytics product development environmental policy she's now building bluesky hq dot i n which is helping large brands play in the data set space using satellite data and ai alaska are you ready to take us to the top yeah sure let's go for it all right so this is sort of a big idea here you have some good examples on your website about forest fires in india and quantifying those help me understand what you're building um so we take satellite data large volumes a bit about 30 terabytes plus and ground sensors and we use this data to give more spatial and temporal resolution so for instance the forest fires that we have in india you have in california siberia spain greece everywhere on the planet and we just don't know how much fires is happening how much are the greenhouse gas emissions and all of this information is needed by electric utilities for planning for future by climate insurance by like banks and everybody for like making decisions especially as we have the frequency of forest fires or any extreme climate events rise up in the coming ten years and who are the buyers are these governments um no so it's majorly infrastructure companies because they have to take care of all of this large infrastructure that is like you know supporting our life in the face of climate change and its insurances and investment firms so okay guys so insurance investment firms when you say infrastructure companies can you name one or two real ones electric utilities for instance you know if your electric utility you face forest fires you also face the danger of your infrastructure causing forest fires so it's like a very very important thing you know uh i mean even like for instance home insurances uh in the year 2021 the forest fires in california affected 40 times more houses than the last 10 years of fires combined so you really see how this problem is growing exponentially and then there's a lot of great house gas emissions that come from forest fires and the other thing is with blue sky we don't just focus on forest fires we focus on all environmental data whether it's air pollution water pollution carbon emissions from industries carbon emissions from forest fires the whole spectrum of environment and climate data interesting avalanche and so what might an electric company pay you per month or per year to access your data set or your software um so our data sets go anywhere from like ten thousand dollars to like a million dollar depending on the resolution for instance if you want something with one kilometer square resolution it's cheap but if you want something with like you know 100 meter resolution it's expensive okay and so it's a ten thousand dollars a month or a year uh a year it can go anywhere from 10 grand a year to uh to like a million a year what would you i understand there's a massive range here but what would you say the sweet spot is is 10 000 bucks a year a good average um see we i really can't say the sweet spot because it depends on resolution right well no i get that but if you take all your customers all your revenue divided by all your customers you can get an average um i think it would be good to say that we do 100k a year is it good okay yeah okay and if someone's paying you 100k a year what resolution are they probably getting is that like 10 kilometers 50 no no no you get more resolution with that you get like three hundred dollars for got it yeah got it it really depends on what is the data set right for instance if i'm doing like water pollution monitoring it's very complex monitoring so it's more expensive air quality is cheaper because it's like cheaper modeling the science or the engineering that's needed behind both of these models is like different interesting okay got it so so um and are these people are they paying for a one-time data set a snapshot or are they truly recurring no so our data set is not static it's dynamic so once we deploy our algorithms on the cloud that data set is being generated at a temporal frequency of that particular category so it could be daily it could be once in two days it could be weekly usually our frequencies temporal frequencies for everything is less than once a week so yeah you get like either daily or once in two or three days i see give me more of the back story here this is fascinating when did you write the first line of code for this so we started in january 2019 we're gonna finish three years uh we started my living room actually just there and me and my brother and two of our first engineers and we were all literally operating out of my savings because i used to work at a private equity firm in connecticut before this so we were just you know chilling on a computer table eating pizzas and writing code and we got interested in satellite data because you know it's growing very exponentially both the number of satellites that are going in the orbit and the resolutions that they capture it's same to our iphones you know their resolution you can now zoom your iphones by like 6x this wasn't happening like five years ago and that's the same thing with satellite so we are able to get snapshots of earth all the time for different locations for different parameters and we clean that data crunch that data makes sense of all of this huge volume the data that comes down and we put it for climate action because we really need to know what's happening on our planet to be able to save our planet and avilashi did you and your brother split equity 50 50 on day one or who kept more no i think uh i think we are like one so it's just basic rules of founders that there has to be one final decision point so you never split equity 50 50. one person takes more majority and the other person takes less all right so how much did you take i think i took the majority but then we flipped last year because uh my brother initially started like oh i'm gonna help you for two months and then he was like oh this is so exciting and there's ai and cloud and apis and this is so tech so he's my seat here and he's like okay so this is a technology company and i think we flipped uh flipped out equities last year so he's the majority shareholder now i got it so you just sort of issued him more options one year cliff for your vesting and now he's a little more well we are founders right so for founders that's different because your brother and sister are we just like it's like hey you just take like 10 more are you guys the only have you raised capital or do you bootstrap yeah no we raised capital we raised the seed round last year of about 1.2 million and we have gotten a lot of grants and a lot of prizes like ai innovation prices so it took us up to like i think eight hundred thousand dollars or something yeah uh-huh and so when you did the raise last year for 1.2 million did you do it on a safe or price round we did a price round oh oh right out of the gate why did you make that decision um i think uh you know it depends on different markets in the u.s market you can do 1.2 million of safe but in the indian market you know it's not that easy like usually the rounds get priced also first time founder problems like you know we don't know you don't know better somebody's coming like oh i'm going to invest in millions like for climate change you should sell it so the valuation is totally depends on your ability to tell a great story and sell the vision so what valuation did you end up raising at i think it's something around seven million i i have to look again okay and any plans to raise now or you can stay bootstrapped for a while you can skate capital efficient for a while so we are capital efficient because we are like you know um we are we are just a tech company of about 20 people completely remote so mostly it's engineering and data talent but we are planning to raise more capital and actually flip the netherlands because it's a very exciting domain for like space data and like climate change so we are looking to raise about five to six million dollars more and just flip it over the you know in the next year beginning tell me a little bit more about customer growth tell me how did you get your first customer oh my god so we initially made the data set and we thought that nobody would care about it like nobody and then the largest mobile company in india was like oh my god can we take your data and integrate it with like millions of mobile phones in india and that was so exciting because you know we literally spent first seven months listening to people telling us hey air pollution that should be done by governments or non-profits this is the army by the way yeah that is xiaomi so they took our data and like you know our apis the hits went from 10 000 to like a million like overnight also our api gateway broke because we didn't imagine that much amount of like customers that much amount of users taking interest in environmental data even today the idea that nathan would want to know how much is water in the reservoirs and the town that he lives in is very bizarre people are like oh abby no one's gonna pay for it but i really feel that as the years go by like three years four years five years later climate data is going to be extremely valuable yeah i mean you're seeing this in california right now i mean it's insane um okay so that's how...