It's Earth observation satellites are equipped with synthetic-aperture radar sensors that can collect imagery through clouds and at night.

The company was founded in 2016 by Payam Banazadeh, a former engineer at Jet Propulsion Laboratory of NASA, and William Walter Woods.,[2] has more than 200 employees (January 2024), and raised venture capital from investors such as Canaan Partners, Data Collective, Pear VC and Spark Capital.

[3] Capella designs, manufactures and operates its fleet of SAR satellites to provide high-resolution, all-weather imagery to the U.S. government and commercial customers.

Customers can use a self-service electronic portal and API to task a Capella satellite for a radar image.

Capella was also awarded two Commercial Satellite Data Acquisition (CSDA) contracts with NASA to determine the suitability of Capella’s data to advance NASA’s Earth science missions: a multi-year blanket purchase agreement and a n indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity, multiple-award contract.

This enables NASA research evaluators from across the country with easy access to Capella’s high-resolution data archive and automated tasking capabilities as they find novel new ways to monitor the Earth and the environment.

Canadian officials have easy access to Capella’s high-quality imagery and automated tasking capabilities for a variety of use cases including monitoring natural resources, mining operations, ice flows, maritime activity and more.

It was booked to fly as a rideshare passenger on the Falcon 9 launch with Argentina's SAOCOM 1B radar observation satellite in late March 2020.

But that launch was also delayed at the request of Argentine's space agency (CONAE) as travel and work restrictions were implemented at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.