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NASA Recognizes Our Vision for Sustainable Business Models

*By Adolfo Perez-Duran

A Recognition That Points Toward the Future

I am honored to share that I was named one of the winners of NASA’s Sustainable Business Model Challenge. This recognition is humbling — not because of the award itself, but because it represents validation of an idea that has been core to our mission from the very beginning: make innovation effortless for machine learning researchers and industry by unlocking the power of remote sensing data. .

Why This Challenge Matters

NASA has always been a symbol of pushing boundaries — not just in space exploration, but in rethinking what’s possible for science, technology, and humanity. The Sustainable Business Model Challenge invited innovators from across the world to submit approaches that could re-imagine how organizations grow and sustain impact.

Unlike many competitions that focus only on short-term results or flashy prototypes, this challenge went deeper. It asked us to design business models that could stand the test of time. That’s the real frontier: building mechanisms that don’t collapse under scale, cost, or complexity, but instead become stronger as they grow.

Our Submission: Removing the Bottleneck in AI and Earth Data

At Orange Monk Labs, we see a bottleneck that slows down progress for researchers, startups, and enterprises alike: access to high-quality, machine-learning-ready training datasets from satellite imagery.

AI can transform how we monitor forests, forecast floods, secure food supplies, and plan resilient cities. But every breakthrough depends on one thing: clean, curated, labeled training data. Today, producing those datasets is slow, expensive, and error-prone.

Our submission to NASA’s challenge was simple in concept but bold in ambition:

• Deliver bottomless, high-quality training datasets from satellite imagery.

• Make them scalable, affordable, and continuously refreshed.

• Remove the manual curation bottleneck that currently holds back AI innovation.

By solving this core data problem, we help others accelerate their work. Researchers can move faster. Startups can bring solutions to market sooner. Enterprises can scale impact. Policymakers can make decisions with confidence.

Why Sustainability Is Built Into This Model

True sustainability is about designing systems that are resilient, adaptable, and enduring.

Here’s how our model aligns with that vision:

• Scalable by Design: As new satellite missions like NASA-ISRO’s NISAR or ESA’s Sentinel-next launch, our pipelines can automatically adapt to ingest new data streams.

• Low-Cost Accessibility: By removing expensive manual steps, we make datasets affordable to a broad community — from graduate students to global enterprises.

• Global Impact: Training and inference datasets can support agriculture, disaster management, water monitoring, and more.

• Continuous Innovation: Sustainability also means staying relevant. Our approach evolves alongside AI techniques, ensuring long-term value.

Gratitude and Responsibility

I am deeply grateful to NASA for recognizing this vision and to the global innovation community for reminding us that collaboration drives progress. This win is not just a validation — it’s a responsibility.

When NASA affirms that your business model matters, it’s a call to double down. To go faster. To go further. To invite more partners, researchers, and visionaries into the work.

The Road Ahead

Winning the challenge is not the finish line. It is the starting signal.

Our next steps include:

• Expanding our partnerships with universities, research labs, and startups who need curated datasets.

• Scaling our infrastructure so that “bottomless training data” isn’t a metaphor but a reality.

• Continuing to experiment with sustainable models for access, including freemium datasets, open science contributions, and enterprise-grade offerings.

We believe that if AI is to help humanity face its toughest challenges, access to training data cannot remain scarce or costly. By making it abundant, we unlock innovation that we can’t even imagine yet.

Our journey is just beginning. 🚀🌍