Building Radar takes home the Copernicus Masters

Now in its fifth year, the Copernicus Masters competition seeks fresh ideas for businesses based on Earth observation data, while encouraging creative product development and entrepreneurship in Europe. This year, the competition received more than 200 entries from 50 countries.

Building Radar GmbH, providing a global, satellite-based online database for new construction projects, is this year’s overall winner of the international Copernicus Masters Earth observation competition.

Josef Aschbacher, Head of Programme Planning & Coordination within ESA’s Earth Observation Programmes Directorate, presented the €20 000 grand prize to Building Radar's managing director, Paul Indinger. 

“Building Radar’s combination of Earth observation data, including Sentinel-2 optical data, machine learning and data mining has created an all-new service for the construction industry,” Prof Aschbacher stated.

“It also clearly demonstrates both the usefulness Copernicus provides to a wide range of sectors and the Copernicus Masters ability to discover market-oriented applications of Earth observation data.”

Founded in 2014 in Munich, the start-up came out on top in the competition’s European Space Imaging High-Res Urban Challenge. It went on to grab the grand prize, against the winners of seven other categories.

The Building Radar online platform, which already contains more than a million construction projects and over 200 000 company profiles, uses custom software to identify new building projects around the world. 

Customers include companies in the new construction and maintenance sectors. Building Radar verifies online search results and track changes in projects, through satellite imagery. The platform thus enables its users to monitor many different construction endeavours, while supplying cost efficiency.

Along with the overall winner, those who emerged victorious in nine topic-specific categories took home prizes worth more than € 300 000 in total. These included cash, consulting, data packages and other assistance, designed to help the winners refine their ideas for a possible market launch at one of ESA’s 11 Business Incubation Centres.

As in the previous year, the Awards Ceremony occurred in parallel with the Satellite Masters Conference. This gave the winners the opportunity to introduce their ideas to the international Earth observation and navigation communities.