Back in November, Awais Ahmed, dressed all in black from his glasses to his trousers, paused for a moment outside his startup’s Bangalore laboratory to peer through a glass window at a stout contraption: a 2.5-foot-tall satellite partially covered in gold foil.

A giant eye stared back at him. Mounted atop the satellite was a hyperspectral camera, containing a superpowered lens that would eventually capture a picture of the Earth below across hundreds of light wavelengths.

Satellite imaging has been around for decades, and hyperspectral cameras aren’t brand-new either, but Ahmed says the version made by his startup, Pixxel, represents a fresh innovation in the field, thanks to far greater optics and resolution than existing ones. Two months earlier, NASA had announced it was signing on as a Pixxel customer as part of a nearly half-billion-dollar deal that Pixxel will share with several other companies from across the globe. In the next two years, Ahmed intends to send as many as 24 of these satellites, which he calls his Fireflies and Honeybees, into space.