IMARC tech stars 2025: Part 1
- 28 May 2025
Mark Vandenabeele and Geospatial Technology Associates business partner Bill Basener can’t wait to get to IMARC 2025 in Sydney in October and there will be some hyperspectral imaging aficionados Down Under who will already have the event dates pencilled into their calendars, too.
Basener, an emeritus professor at New York’s Rochester Institute of Technology whose hyperspectral imaging methods and software are said to have become the gold-standard in the field, started GTA with Vandenabeele in 2015 after they met while working for Virginia-based US defence contractor, Exelis.
Mathematics PhD Basener has authored published research on image processing, machine learning, signal processing, dynamical systems, game theory, ecological economics and evolutionary genetics and the Basener-Ross model for modelling ecological collapse has been used in studies of ancient civilisations. He’s secured various invention patents in hyperspectral imaging and a topological anomaly detection system he conceived has been used in disaster relief efforts around the world.
Vandenabeele, a former US Air Force intelligence analyst and US defence contractor, says the pair were also doing hyperspectral image analysis work together for the US Army National Ground Intelligence Center, out of an office in Charlottesville, Virginia, when they decided to form a data analytics software company on the back of an automated hyperspectral image processing algorithm Basener had patented. Vandenabeele says they saw the success of methods proven at scale in the most demanding circumstances and “we knew we wanted to make them available beyond government defence programs”.
He says GTA has had a particularly busy past 18 months or so, raising some venture capital and partnering with Austin, Texas-based satellite data analytics start-up SkyFi on hyperspectral imaging [HSI] data processing, including in lithium and other mineral detection.
“We started getting into the mining industry because one of our investors is big time into rare earth elements and other minerals,” he says. “Our early work outside the US government involved identifying minerals in drill cores from a mine in Arizona.
“With SkyFi we created a lithium detection module. We’ve been able to detect lithium ore deposits using HSI data. We've had companies ask us about finding gold. Usually with hyperspectral you’re not usually looking for the material that someone is requesting.
“Our work often involves determining the associated chemicals and materials for a target, collecting spectra of the chemical indicators and locating these spectra in the data using our patented methods.
“In our work for the US Army Corps of Engineers with the University of Virgina we use hyperspectral imagery to map salt water intrusions into groundwater along coastal areas. The salt water is not visible but the salinised environment alters the types of vegetation that can thrive. By mapping vegetation species in an area we can determine the extent of saltwater intrusion and hydrological patterns.
“We take that mindset and apply it to minerals so when somebody’s asking us about gold we may be looking for arsenic in pine trees that are indications of gold in that region. We’ll map all the pine trees that have arsenic using remotely sensed data.
“In some industries there’s a reluctance about using this type of technology because it's not cut and dried. It’s not X marks the spot. But the mining industry is a bit more open to newer technologies.
“We went to the MINExpo [in Las Vegas] last year and I was blown away at some of the things that were going on in the mining space.
“I saw somebody putting an XRF scanner on a bucket to analyse the dirt they scoop in that bucket. Man, that’s pretty cool. That’s pretty advanced. I have noticed a tonne of automation in the trucks and the machinery.”
Vandenabeele acknowledges Australia’s leading position in this regard and says IMARC represents a high watermark as an international meeting platform. “The draw that the conference itself has is impressive. I try to get the most bang for the buck when I'm looking at industry events. Sometimes it’s like, there’s 300 people attending and it’s $7000 to go and I’m like, are you kidding me?
“But this is 10,000 people; it’s casting the net wide. And the [IMARC Connect] meeting platform means I can go there knowing I’ve got meetings scheduled ahead of time so we're not just standing there trying to pull folks into the booth with cool graphics and whiz-bang slide shows.”
GTA will have the cool graphics and tools, including one of its spectrometers, on hand, along with brand new software, Flux, for displaying its very cool data.
It will also have one of the planet’s best hyperspectral data minds available for a chat.
Inauro
Another company on the IMARC 2025 exhibitor floor with a Texas connection is Inauro.
The standout Australian IoT software startup established its first offshore office in Frisco, Texas, earlier this year on the back of its major – and expanding – partnership with Brink’s, which has seen it connect the US security group’s 4000 or so armoured trucks to its Perspio operational automation platform. Inauro chief commercial officer Max Girault says the Brink’s deployment will extend to other assets, ranging from money counters to driver body cameras, through 2025.
“We’re also looking at other Brink's markets where we can do the same level of automation and help them centralise the way they manage their fleets,” he says, adding the scale and speed of the platform integration within a US$5 billion-a-year logistics firm has not been lost on other potential enterprise customers.
“The scale in the US is different to what we're used to in Australia. So the first really interesting discussions we’re having have a lot more zeros than the fleets that we’re dealing with in Australia – and we deal with the bigger fleets here. But it is really exciting to see that take off.”
Inauro is a five-year-old spinoff from the biggest family-owned equipment hire business in Australia and New Zealand, Kennards Hire. Former Kennards Hire CEO Angus Kennard started Inauro when material benefits of the Perspio software within Kennards became evident to other companies. “We were not looking at this from a technology lens,” Kennard has said. “The tech was there. It was connecting the business systems with the technology and our people that [meant] the rubber hit the road.”
A A$3 million investment in Inauro by Australian workplace operations tech unicorn SafetyCulture in 2022 ultimately connected Inauro and Brink’s, a SafetyCulture user. The latter said: “By linking data from sensors, devices and other digital systems used within an organisation, Inauro provides teams with a single source of data, streamlining workflows and enabling faster decision making.”
SafetyCulture’s first US-based employee, Joshua Yeamans, also held a senior operational role at Brink’s before becoming Inauro’s general manager for the Americas in February this year. Yeamens believes Inauro has enormous potential to impact asset-intensive industries where “operational workflow automation and sensor integration remain untapped”.
Girault, a seasoned tech company executive, says those asset-intensive industries include mining where he sees accelerating digital maturity coinciding with rapidly climbing demands for the insights real-time data can bring.
“Over the last five years we’ve worked on the sidelines of mine sites, whether that’s through light vehicle fleets, managing lighting towers, which we do now on a couple of BHP sites, or more static monitoring tasks [such as] fuel management,” he says.
“But we’re starting to see the emergence of a really interesting story around a connected mine site and what that means and how we can automate the different systems to talk to each other so we can create efficiencies.
“There’s already data there in mining and a lot of the work that we're looking to do is just streamline how that data is then being used. It includes very operational things and very simple things … but it’s really about how data can be leveraged properly inside an operation to streamline how the work is being done.”
Girault does see a competitive asset management software landscape in mining. “[But] we still haven't seen a platform that has that flexibility that we provide into building those integrations between the systems and having that industrialised as a SaaS offering rather than a custom build for a big tier one operator.”
IMARC 2025 visitors will get a chance to see such a platform up close.
Technology is a precious commodity today in mining and IMARC 2025 will give visitors, including many operators, a rich sample of what the international tech community currently has to offer. This article is part of an exclusive series on this year’s tech exhibitors and sponsors.
