[4] Orbital Insight was founded in 2013 by James Crawford, who earlier worked with artificial intelligence systems at Bell Labs, with Google Books and with NASA's Mars rover project.

[4] In 2015, the company partnered with the World Bank to improve its poverty data, using building height and rooftop material analysis to approximate wealth.

One goal was to improve imagery applications in poor weather or lighting conditions, for better identification of natural and manmade threats.

[12] Also in September, Orbital Insight partnered with Royal Bank of Canada's RBC Capital Markets arm to use geospatial imagery to predict trends in energy, mining, and location intelligence fields.

[4] Also in May, Orbital Insight announced Earth Monitor, the first product that came from its Airbus satellite imagery partnership,[11] which was a white labeling of Orbital Insight GO with additional custom work to enable integration with Airbus' proprietary satellites and imagery purchasing web flows.

Orbital Insight analyzes satellite, drone, balloon and other unmanned aerial vehicle images, along with phone geolocation data, by applying machine learning techniques with computer vision to extract information that can be used for business decisions.

Applications of the technology include estimating retail revenue by studying car counts at malls, helping insurance companies estimate the extent of damages from natural disasters, gauging a country's fuel supply by counting oil storage facilities, and assisting with strategic defense applications for threat assessments.

[10][18][19][7][8] The company's Global Geospatial Crude Index (GCI) monitors millions of barrels of oil on a daily basis by tracking 25,000 external floating roof tanks.