Latitudo 40

Latitudo 40, from Naples, turns satellite imagery into urban analytics a city hall can act on: surface heat island maps, the measured effect of green infrastructure, regeneration indicators. It operates no satellites. It buys multispectral and thermal imagery and sells the interpretation, through a platform aimed at municipal planners rather than remote sensing specialists.

The bet is that cities will pay for pre-digested indicators when they would never hire an imagery analyst. Gaetano Volpe and three co-founders started the company in 2017 out of the Naples university ecosystem, and the work shows up across Europe: an urban heat database tested with Helsinki, Flanders and Murcia, heat-risk work in Catania, engagements cited with Amsterdam, Athens and Milan.

Eight years in, the funding rounds remain small and the city engagements look more like pilots and funded projects than large recurring contracts. Selling to municipalities means slow procurement, and the free Copernicus data ecosystem keeps lowering the barrier for rivals selling the analysis alone.