Problem

Orbio Earth addresses the oil-and-gas industry’s information gap around methane emissions. Existing inventories can understate emissions by roughly 70%, while conventional collection is manual, expensive and too infrequent to cover the roughly 12 million oil-and-gas assets worldwide. The result is a costly blind spot: methane is a highly potent greenhouse gas, leaked gas represents lost saleable product, and incomplete measurement makes it difficult for operators, investors and regulators to assess real performance.

The economics are becoming more immediate as well as environmental. Orbio cites an estimated 10 million metric tons of methane released from onshore oil-and-gas exploration and production in 2023, with continued emissions potentially exposing companies to billions of dollars in fines. The killer use case is helping operators identify persistent “super-emitter” events across global portfolios in under 24 hours, investigate them on the ground, and address them before they trigger regulatory action or become recurring operating and reputational liabilities.

Product / Service

Orbio sells satellite-based methane emissions data and analysis to oil-and-gas companies and financial institutions. Its algorithms process freely available satellite imagery, including data from satellites not specifically designed for methane monitoring; spectral signatures are used to detect methane, while atmospheric and wind conditions are incorporated to quantify and geolocate emissions to underlying assets. The platform fuses satellite and ground data with machine learning and provides a web interface plus an API.

The product turns remote-sensing data into operational and investment intelligence: asset-level plume measurements, interactive visualisations, historical and current trend analysis, uncertainty estimates, and standardised reports for compliance and investors. Operators can prioritise inspections and abatement, while private-equity and other energy investors can compare measured emissions with reported Scope 1 emissions, estimate under-reporting and model the cost of abatement. Orbio’s commercial model is subscription-based data and analysis, with the company reporting delivery of emissions data within 48 hours and, on its oil-and-gas offering, detections in under 24 hours.

Market

Orbio competes in the emerging methane-tracking and industrial emissions-monitoring market, combining satellite remote sensing, geospatial analytics and environmental intelligence. Its primary customers are oil-and-gas operators managing regulatory and operational risk, alongside private-equity and other financial users assessing energy portfolios. The competitive set includes GHGSat and Kayrros; a competitive listing for GHGSat also places Orbio alongside Vantor, while Orbio positions its approach around using broad, freely available satellite data rather than relying only on methane-specific spacecraft.

The available evidence indicates that Orbio is commercial rather than pre-revenue, although it does not disclose customer counts or revenue. By November 2024, the ESA reported that its pilots with two user groups had been successful, that the platform had processed approximately 12 million data points and 300,000 emission detections, and that the solution had been commercialised. TechCrunch also reported subscribing customers, processing of 10–20 terabytes of data daily, and delivery within 48 hours. Orbio announced a $4 million seed round in March 2024 backed by Initialized Capital, Y Combinator, the European Space Agency, Leap Forward Ventures and angels; the public record supports meaningful early traction but not yet a quantified scale of revenue or customer adoption.