Terravek Labs was founded in 2018 and is now thirty-one people across Delft and Toulouse. We spend 17.4% of revenue on research and development, of which Labs is roughly a quarter.
We fund three categories. First, methods that make existing products measurably better — atmospheric correction, uncertainty quantification, co-registration. This is the majority and it has a clear path to product.
Second, capabilities we believe customers will need in three to five years and cannot buy today. Persistent scatterer interferometry was in this category in 2019 and is now in three products.
Third, a small amount of work with no commercial thesis at all, because a research group that only does directed work stops attracting the people who make the directed work good.
How we stop: every project has a written hypothesis and a review at six and eighteen months against pre-registered criteria. We killed four projects last year. Killing them well — with the negative result written up and published — is the part that most organisations skip and the part that makes the next decision better.