Caelus began in synthetic aperture radar research.
The measurement was being taken. Nobody was receiving it.
Working on SAR-based flood assessment, the pattern that kept surfacing was not technical. It was that the capability already existed. Satellites were recording flood extent over places where no gauge, no agency, and no record existed on the ground.
Caelus started as an attempt to close that specific distance, between a signal that already exists and the people who could act on it.
It grew out of NovaSpark, a student pitch competition run in 2025 and 2026. NovaSpark worked on the standard model: founders bring ideas, judges pick winners. The recurring problem was that the ideas arrived looking for a problem to attach to. Caelus inverts that. The problem comes first, found in data, and the opportunity to respond is what gets handed out.
Founder · est. 2025
Amogh Vinaykumar
researcher @ mit, princeton, and stanford
Most of my time goes to synthetic aperture radar, the one instrument that sees through cloud, smoke, and night.
SAR already records the floods, the damage, and the displacement that never reach a gauge or a report. The bottleneck is not the satellite. It is that raw radar is noisy, hard to read, and almost never turned into something a person on the ground can use.
That gap is the whole reason Caelus exists.
Making radar
readable.
Raw SAR arrives speckled and hard to interpret. Everything Caelus does downstream depends on fixing that first.
Kairos
Free · open to any researcher
A browser-based SAR research tool for reading and processing radar imagery without a local pipeline. It is used by more than 100 researchers, at institutions including:
- Cambridge
- Yale
- GFZ Potsdam
- German Aerospace Center
We will put a brief together for you at no cost.
For organizations
If you work in one of our focus regions and want to see what our data shows for your area, tell us and we will build it.
For researchers
SAR, remote sensing, and geospatial collaboration, and ground truth that corrects what we have wrong.
For anyone else
If you know a place that deserves a closer look, that is the most useful thing you can send us.