# Descartes Labs

Descartes Labs is an Asset Manager based in Santa Fe, United States.

## Overview

- **Organization type:** Asset Manager
- **Headquarters:** Santa Fe, United States
- **Region:** North America
- **Address:** Santa Fe, NM, United States
- **Founded:** 2014
- **Assets under management:** Undisclosed
- **Website:** descarteslabs.com
- **LinkedIn:** https://www.linkedin.com/company/descartes-labs

## Regulatory record

- **Reports private funds:** No

## About

Descartes Labs is a company based in Santa Fe, United States, founded in 2014. It provides access to science-ready imagery and intelligence from various data sources. The company has secured $58 million in total funding.

## Sectors

- AI/ML
- ClimateTech
- AgriTech & FoodTech
- Energy Transition & Renewables

## People

- Mark Johnson — Co-Founder and CEO

## Questions

### Who runs investment decisions at Descartes Labs?

Descartes Labs operates with a scientific leadership team led by CEO and co-founder Mark Johnson. Investment decisions appear to flow from the firm's proprietary machine-learning models, which generate trading signals from satellite data. There is no separate CIO structure publicly disclosed.

### Is Descartes Labs a SaaS company or a hedge fund?

Structurally, it is a hybrid. The firm sells its geospatial analytics platform to enterprise customers for supply-chain monitoring and sustainability tracking. But its founding team built the technology to exploit trading opportunities in commodity markets, and Descartes Labs has historically used its own signals to inform principal trading in agricultural commodities and related derivatives.

### Which sectors does Descartes Labs explicitly focus on?

The firm's satellite-based machine learning models are tuned to forecast production in agriculture, energy, and metals and mining. Its models also extend to environmental monitoring for sustainability-linked finance and insurance. While primarily focused on commodities, the platform can detect changes in any physical asset visible from space, from shipping traffic to deforestation.

### Where does the underlying technology come from?

The firm's core deep-learning capability was developed at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where the founding team worked on national security applications requiring detection of subtle signals in vast satellite datasets. In 2014, they spun the technology into a commercial entity, adapting it for commodity markets and enterprise customers.

### How is Descartes Labs involved with government or defense work?

Descartes Labs was selected for the Defense Innovation Unit's first cohort, which fast-tracks commercial technology into the Department of Defense. The partnership validates the firm's ability to map and monitor physical systems globally using AI-driven satellite analysis, though the specific defense applications remain largely undisclosed.

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- [Cumming Capital](https://altss.com/profile/cumming-capital)
- [Interconnect Solutions Company](https://altss.com/profile/interconnect-solutions-company)

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Last updated: 2026-06-03T20:00:00.000Z

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