About Luke Fischer
Luke Fischer is the CEO and co-founder of SkyFi. He is a former U.S. Army helicopter pilot and Special Operations veteran who transitioned through DIU (Defense Innovation Unit), Uber Elevate (as Head of Flight Operations), and Joby Aviation (leading government operations) before founding SkyFi in late 2021. He also spent time as an Entrepreneur in Residence in VC, which gave him direct exposure to what gets funded — and what doesn’t. That multi-domain journey across military, Big Tech, and venture is core to how he built SkyFi.
About SkyFi
SkyFi is a geospatial intelligence marketplace and platform that aggregates satellite imagery and analytics from hundreds of commercial satellite operators — making it accessible to any customer, anywhere, via web or mobile app. Rather than owning or launching satellites, SkyFi sits at the aggregation layer: abstracting away which provider owns the satellite and letting users task imagery or pull analytics with a button press. The business is currently approximately 80% government / 20% commercial, serving customers ranging from top global hedge funds and agriculture companies to Special Operations Forces, NATO, and allied governments across Asia. SkyFi closed its Series A in December 2024.
1. The most strategically valuable position in a fragmented market isn’t owning supply; it’s owning demand data.
Every satellite company in the geospatial ecosystem has a narrow, siloed view of what their customers want: just the buyers who came to them, for their specific imagery type. SkyFi sits above all of them. Because they aggregate demand across hundreds of providers, they accumulate something no individual satellite company can build — a behavioral map of who is buying what, where, and when, across the entire market. Luke is explicit about this: it’s how Uber used location data to place bikes, scooters, and Uber Eats in specific cities. The analytical products SkyFi builds aren’t guesswork; they’re derived from four years of observed customer intent at scale. The business that processes demand will always know more than the business that only fulfills it.
2. When a government customer tells you their own internal tools are useless, write it down. That’s your pitch.
Luke didn’t make up the claim that commercial imagery can solve 97% of what classified assets are currently used for. A government customer told him that. Classified imagery systems are slow, bureaucratic, and rationed; commercial imagery is instant, cheap, and available to anyone with a credit card. The mismatch between what exists and what gets delivered to the warfighter is a distribution problem. SkyFi’s entire government business is built on that one honest sentence from an operator who was frustrated with their own system.
3. Protecting customers becomes a competitive strategy.
Satellite providers — who are simultaneously SkyFi’s supply chain and potential competitors — routinely asked for SkyFi’s customer names, framing it as diligence. Luke refused. He reverse-engineered why they were actually asking (Salesforce, i.e., direct outreach) and built a better diligence process to neutralize the argument. The suppliers eventually came back around because they trusted SkyFi more than the brokers who gave up their customer lists. In this aggregator model, the moment Luke let his suppliers touch the demand side, he would’ve handed them the roadmap to cut him out. The customer list is the moat.
4. Dynamic pricing for geopolitical risk is coming to satellite imagery.
This one didn’t get much airtime, but it’s worth sitting with. SkyFi tracks heat maps of customer tasking behavior. When tasking activity spikes around a particular geographic area, that’s a signal that imagery of that area is becoming more valuable. Luke has Uber’s former dynamic pricing engineers on his team specifically to build this. In a world of escalating conflicts and rapid geopolitical shifts, the pricing of intelligence will eventually reflect real-time demand, just like surge pricing reflects a concert letting out.
5. The biggest adoption barrier for new technology is…
Awareness. As Luke and SkyFi went through NATI DIANA, they found that allied defense ministers and government officials consistently didn’t know that commercial satellite tasking was instant and cheap. They assumed the James Bond spy satellite model — months of budget process, classified clearances, exquisite assets. The awareness gap is real, and it’s not the gap between “interested” and “buying.” It’s the gap between “has no idea this exists” and “interested.” It’s a very different sales motion if you’re informing vs. persuading. And it means the addressable market is almost certainly larger than anyone’s current TAM model accounts for.
For more SkyFi: skyfi.com
For more Crossing the Valley: valleycrossers.com
Follow Luke: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lukemfischer/
Follow Noah: https://www.linkedin.com/in/noahsheinbaum/
