TWO Edinburgh business leaders are propelling their company to the forefront of international space applications and innovation with support from the Scottish Government and UMi Debt Finance Scotland.
Since 2011, Astrosat CEO Steve Lee and COO Fraser Hamilton, who met whilst studying at Caltech, have been successfully maximising their combined astrophysics and banking skills to win significant contracts in the highly competitive space industry.
At eight years old, Astrosat is something of an old-new space company. Lee and Hamilton are embarking on a huge product which will standardise mapping and satellite data to identify the UK’s ageing and vulnerable populations and help public bodies protect them from the effects of cold weather, isolation, illness and pandemics such as coronavirus.
Lee explained: “Astrosat takes data from space and presents it visually to help people understand and improve the planet. Our Scottish Enterprise-supported Nexus programme looks at cold air weather patterns and pollution and the direct links with illness and prevention.
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“We saw that it had obvious applications to help health service managers and give government a tool to help make and report on decisions on coronavirus, but to really push it along, we needed some big computer power, including a data centre and new kit – and for that, we needed funding.
“What we do can be difficult for the conventional lending groups to grasp – it’s a weird business and requires a very technically-oriented mind to get it. High street banks saw it as being too speculative and didn’t want to know. Investors would have shredded our budgets into confetti, and loans from existing contracts weren’t feasible either.
“We tried everything. Everything, that is, until I happened across an ad for UMi Debt Finance Scotland. I emailed them on a Sunday night – and by Monday morning everything had changed for us.”
The UMi Debt Finance Scotland loan scheme, supported under the Scottish Growth Scheme, is designed to help Scottish businesses innovate, grow and diversify.
Astrosat was approved for a £100,000 loan, which will be linked to another contract they have just won from the European Space Agency.
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