Descartes Labs

Descartes Labs has created a cloud-based supercomputing platform for the application of machine intelligence to massive data sets. A data refinery, built to understand our planet.

Founded 2014
51-200 employees
  • Analytics & Business Information
  • Headquarters address
    100 N Guadalupe Street, Santa Fe, NM, 87501
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    What we do

    At Descartes Labs, we have a perfect blend for a startup: we're pushing the boundaries of science, our product is of great value to businesses, and our data will improve the lives of everyone on the planet.

    We're trying to make a living, breathing map of the world so that we can better understand our planet. Satellites are constantly taking pictures of the planet but the value isn't in the pixels, but in the information derived from it. At Descartes Labs, we want to look at the Earth as an organism and watch how we as humans effect our environment.

    That sounds like a lofty goal (it certainly is) but there are many practical applications: understanding the supply of natural resources, watching those resources move around, and looking at macroeconomic indicators from hundreds of miles above the Earth.

    Our first product is global map of agriculture. Already we've tackled corn production in the US and are well on our way to understanding all major crops at global scale. Though we eventually plan to look at other areas - such as mining, oil & gas, and human activity - we're focused on better data for the trillion-dollar ag industry.

    Data is our lifeblood and we've built an impressive infrastructure to manage and analyze colossal amounts of data. One of the coolest things we've done to date is process an entire petabyte of data in just 16 hours using 30,000 cores on the Google Cloud. We're looking forward to beating the pants off that calculation in 2016.

    Our Culture

    Descartes Labs is a quirky company - and we'd like to keep it that way.

    Our team has a diverse set of backgrounds. We're rather physics-heavy (astrophysics, cosmology, particle physics, etc.), but also have a resident mathematician, a philosopher as our CEO, a few experts in remote sensing, and of course a lot of great engineers.

    Early on, we decided we'd always want to hire brilliant people who are attracted to tough problems; but to keep a high level of respect within the company. So far, we're happy to say that's been working out splendidly.

    We try to keep process minimal to allow everyone to apply their brains to more important tasks. That being said, we are hyper-focused and constantly set challenging - sometimes ridiculous - goals for ourselves. The most successful people at Descartes Labs are those who understand both our near-term and long-term endpoint and relentlessly apply their talents wherever needed.

    Our History

    Our original team of scientists and underlying technology spun out of Los Alamos National Laboratory, save our CEO, who was imported from San Francisco. That being said, we're not just a bunch of academics in an ivory tower. We've worked hard over the past year to apply years of research to problems that businesses care about. After opening our doors in December 2014, we quickly decided to focus on agriculture and released our first product - an analysis of corn production in the US - in August 2015. We closed a second round of funding in October 2015 from an ag-focused venture capital firm.

    Our Offices

    Our headquarters is in Los Alamos, NM and we have engineers in San Francisco and a sales team in NYC. Since you likely don't know a lot about New Mexico, let us tell you a bit more. Los Alamos is where Los Alamos National Lab is, most famous for the Manhattan Project, but one of the United States' biggest and most prestigious national labs. Los Alamos is close to Santa Fe, NM, a town known for its rich history (the oldest house, the oldest church structure, and the oldest gov't building in the US are all in Santa Fe), its vibrant art scene, and its access to nature. Northern New Mexico has a fantastic climate - summers in the high 80s and mild winters - and insanely amazing hiking, biking, kayaking, and other outdoor activities. With a 12,000 feet. Not only do we have all of this, but you can easily rent or even buy a house around Santa Fe.

    Even if you choose to work out of our San Francisco office, a huge perk of working at Descartes Labs is frequent visits to one of America's hidden gems.

    Tech stack

    Google Compute Engine, AWS, Python, C

    Benefits

    Health and wellness

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