Spire’s Silicon Valley office. Photo: Spire

[Via Satellite 06-10-2015] Scottish Enterprise, the international investment and trade promotion agency of the Scottish government, has awarded up to $2.9 million in grants to Spire. The new funds will support the opening of a new office in Glasgow, Scotland along with further international growth. Spire plans to double its Glasgow team to more than 50 full-time employees by 2018.

The recent grant follows $25 million in Series A funding Spire raised in 2014, which brought the total amount raised to $29 million and fueled a new branch location in Singapore. Spire cited Scotland’s lower cost base and extensive range of universities as key reasons for its interest in the region.

Spire’s Glasgow office, the company’s third office globally, will help develop the next generation of GPS Radio Occultation (RO) technology. The company previously announced intentions to build a constellation of 20 commercial weather satellites, which are slated to launch this year. According to Spire, the constellation will be able to provide five times more GPS-RO weather data than is currently available from today’s fleet of weather satellites for significantly reduced cost.