Background Image: Sutichak Yachaingham / 123 Stock Photo
Pixalytics is celebrating its twelfth birthday this week! We were born in 2012 and although it was a few more months until we started trading, the journey began twelve years ago this week.
According to the latest statistics from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, for the year ending March 2023, 65.3% of US business fail within ten years and only 25% get to fifteen years. In the UK, the figures are worse, with 61.6% business failing to survive for five years. So, for us, achieving twelve years is a feat in itself!
Pixalytics journey has had its up and downs, but the business provides us with an income and we’ve managed to make a profit in all but one of our years; sometimes the profit was not huge, but neither was the loss. We’ve only ever been based at Plymouth Science Park, but have moved around four different offices during that time. We moved to bigger offices as we grew and gained employees, and this flexibility is one of the perks of the Science Park and we are always grateful for their help and support on this aspect.
Like many businesses the pandemic years have had a significant impact on our approach to running the company. We’re focusing more now on collaboration and working in partnerships with other companies, rather than looking to lead large projects and having numerous employees. It’s a different way of doing things and better supports our personal well-being. The change has taken a few years to bed in, but 2024 is shaping up positively.
We worked on numerous wonderful projects over the years, far too many to mention individually by name, and this means we’ve worked with some great teams and colleagues over the years. These have taken Pixalytics around the globe as we’ve collaborated on projects in Australia, Canada, China, Colombia, Kenya, Indonesia, Singapore, Sweden, Uganda, and United States. Certainly, Sam has travelled all over the world with her work for Pixalytics, and she still is travelling – this year has, and will see, visits to Belgium, Estonia, Finland, Italy, Netherlands, Sweden, and Spain, together with various trips around the UK. Working in the space industry gives massive opportunities to travel!
As well as the work itself, we’ve had the chance to be involved in a number of other exciting opportunities:
- We’ve written, and published, two editions of The Practical Handbook of Remote Sensing with our publishers CRC Press, an imprint of Taylor and Francis Group.
- We sponsored an F1 car at the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, which saw our name on a car touching 200 miles per hour.
- We went up to the edge of space on a weather balloon.
- We’ve crossed the Atlantic on the Mayflower Autonomous Ship.
- One of our algorithms has been run in space onboard a satellite.
- We’ve also been lucky enough to win a few awards over the years.
For us, this has been an exciting, occasionally stressful, journey and we know we couldn’t do it without all the customers, suppliers, partners, colleagues, employees, placement students, and friends we’ve been involved with over the years. We really appreciate all the help and support we’ve had.
As you probably know, each week we write a blog and, shockingly, this is blog number 539! I can’t believe we have written that many, and even more surprising, to us at least, is that people read them! Sam is often at conferences and meetings when people come up and tell her how much they enjoy the blog – we even found out recently our blog was on a college course suggested reading list.
We’ve had a great twelve years, but we’re not finished yet and looking forward to see what the future holds. We’ll be sure to tell you all what is happening to us, the Earth Observation sector, and the space industry each week. We’re so grateful to you all for reading and following our journey, thank you.
