CST’s heritage came from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and CalTech. While at CST, the CTO, Dr. Robert Nathan, who is recognized as one of the inventors of digital image processing , often stated that satellite imagery is one of the richest sources of information but it is very difficult to extract as unsupervised classification was not reliable – or at that time even possible given the complexity of the data source.
In the next ten years while working his way up to Vice President of Sales at CST, Clinton was involved in launching the first global satellite imagery browsing system, and helped build a global ground station network in support of the first international high resolution satellite imagery joint venture (of which CST was one of the founders).
20 years later while working on the Global Strategy Team at Google, he began to see unsupervised classification (now referred to as machine learning or deep learning) with satellite imagery become not only viable but, when coupled with cloud technologies, scalable.
Image processing technology finally caught up with the vision of one of the inventors of that same technology and the possibilities had become endless. He then discussed some ideas on how to leverage this with Marc Fagan, a former partner of Google, and they decided to start Kumi Analytics. Dr. Mong Suan Yee, a pioneer in the application of neural networks joined the team and Kumi Analytics was born.
The company was initially focused on using satellite imagery to provide financial institutions insights on the economy and decided to develop environmental applications in order to give back to the world and protect the planet for future generations.
After developing a proof of concept for the Singapore Government’s Emerging Stronger Together Taskforce on green finance, the company shifted its focus to support the carbon sequestration market and thus integrated the passion of protecting the environment with the science of remote sensing and the company’s focus on helping financial services companies scale with location intelligence.