Floods and prevention: how the French start-up Absolut Sensing wants to help communities thanks to its satellites

Tristan Laurent, 37, has spent his entire career in space “because I think it’s really cool all the same.” After working in a British company that sold satellites, the manager decided to go into business on his own.

“Four years ago now, we were seeing more and more waves of drought and floods. It was explained to me that there were 12,000 species over the last 10 years that had disappeared, just become extinct. »

“It’s not so much the average increase in temperatures that’s the problem, because that’s a few inches of degrees,” he continues. It's more that there are more extreme events. And in France, we know how to protect ourselves quite well from that. But the animals in the savannah cannot protect themselves. And it shocked me. »

It was the trigger for the thirty-year-old. “I looked with the satellites, what can we do to help stop the problem? »

And that's when he met a company based in Grenoble which was developing a spectro-imager. “I said to myself, that’s great, that’s what we have to do. If I can contribute in my small way to stemming the problem of global warming, that's what I want to do. And so that’s how we created Absolut Sensing, it was in October 2021.”