Artist rendition of Spire’s Lemur-2 satellite. Photo: Spire

Spire Global posted $43.4 million in revenue for 2021, beating its revised full year guidance of revenue between $40 million and $42 million. This represents a 52% increase over 2020 revenues. 

Spire released its first full-year fiscal results after becoming a public company on Wednesday. The company, which has a constellation of radio frequency-monitoring satellites, went public in August through a special purpose acquisition (SPAC) merger. 

Spire recognized $1.5 million in revenue from its acquisition of exactEarth from the fourth quarter. Excluding exactEarth, full year 2021 revenue would have been $41.9 million, an increase of 47% over the prior fiscal year. Initially, the company projected it would earn $54 million in 2021, but revised guidance in July because of delays with customer and third-party launch provider contracts. 

Spire posted a net loss of $19.3 million. The company logged $40.5 million in general and administrative costs in 2021, a 223% increase over 2021. Earlier in the year, Spire said there were “significant one-time and recurring expenses” due to its SPAC deal. 

The company reports about 600 customers in 58 countries. Spire said it had Spire had 255 organic annual recurring revenue (ARR) solution customers under contract, exceeding guidance issued on November 10, 2021. The company then added 343 ARR customers from exactEarth, ending the fourth quarter with 598 ARR solution customers, a 288% increase year-over-year.

Spire did not provide a breakdown of revenue by business segment between data and its space services segment. CFO Tom Krywe said on Wednesday’s investor call that 2021 revenue was split 56% government, 44% commercial. 

CEO Peter Platzer said on the call that the company is focusing on four core strategies to drive business growth over the next several years: invest in sales, marketing and product; expand into new geographies and use cases; expand data and analytics capabilities; and execute strategic acquisitions. 

In terms of expanding data and analytics capabilities, Platzer announced that Spire recently demonstrated radio signal geolocation capability in-orbit and now has over 40 geolocation capable satellites in-orbit. 

“In the aerospace and defense industry geolocation technology is being used for a growing number of security purposes, like dark vessel detection in the maritime domain and GPS jamming of the land. Spire has developed and demonstrated the capability to geolocate in multiple bands and to detect and geolocate GPS jamming sources in places like China, Syria, Ukraine and other countries across the world,” Platzer said. 

Platzer said that during the quarter, Spire won a multi-year eight-figure contract with a large defense contractor for a space services solution to detect and geolocate targeted radio signals. He expects Spire to grow in this area, and over time to update software on its satellites so that a majority of the constellation will be capable of geolocating signals. 

Spire is expecting a big 2022. The company posted guidance for fiscal year 2022, projecting revenue between $85 million to $90 million, representing year-over-year growth between 96% to 107%. 

“Spire is a leader in leveraging the vantage point of pace to help solve challenges here on earth for corporations, countries, and communities. We remain focused on driving rapid and continued top line growth and moving the company towards its goal of being cash flow positive in the next 24 to 30 months,” Platzer said.

Spire’s stock was down 7% on Thursday, the day after its results were released. The stock is now trading at $2.04.