# Descartes Labs

**Canonical:** https://apis.io/providers/descartes-labs/  
**Website:** https://www.descarteslabs.com  
**APIs profiled:** 6

Descartes Labs was a Santa Fe, New Mexico geospatial intelligence company founded in 2014 as a spin-out from Los Alamos National Laboratory. The company built the Descartes Labs Platform, a cloud-native geospatial data refinery and analytics environment combining a petabyte-scale satellite imagery archive (Landsat, Sentinel-1/2, MODIS, NAIP, PlanetScope, SkySat, commercial radar, NEXRAD weather radar, plus client-uploaded data) with a Python client library, JupyterHub-based workbench, and distributed compute for training and running deep learning and remote-sensing models at scale. Customers in agriculture, mining, energy, defense, insurance, and the U.S. government used the platform to build production geospatial machine learning pipelines covering crop forecasting, mineral exploration, infrastructure monitoring, methane detection, wildfire response, and ESG reporting. The Platform exposed a Catalog (imagery, bands, products, blobs, events), a Compute service (containerised functions, jobs, schedules), a Vector service (tabular and geospatial features), Dynamic Compute (lazy raster algebra and tiling), Auth, and a `descarteslabs` CLI. In October 2024, EarthDaily Analytics — backed by Antarctica Capital — acquired Descartes Labs and the Descartes Labs Government, Inc. subsidiary, folding the team, customers, and platform into the EarthDaily Constellation programme. The product was rebranded EarthOne in 2025; the `descarteslabs` Python package has been formally discontinued in favour of `earthdaily-earthone` (v5.x), the github.com/descarteslabs organisation has been renamed to `dlarchives`, www.descarteslabs.com is now a parked domain, and the docs.descarteslabs.com developer portal has been retired in favour of EarthDaily-hosted EarthOne documentation. This catalog entry preserves the historical Descartes Labs Platform surface as an archive — see the EarthDaily / EarthOne profile for the active product.

## Kin Score — 14.6 / 100 (emerging)

Scored 2026-08-20 under rubric 0.12.0. Trend: flat (+0.0 from 14.6).

| Facet | Score |
|---|---|
| Discoverability | 64.8 |
| Contract Quality | 1.4 |
| Governance | 0.0 |
| Contract Governance | 0.0 |
| Operational Transparency | 18.4 |
| Developer Ergonomics | 28.6 |
| Commercial Clarity | 6.6 |
| Access Clarity | 6.6 |

Regulatory layer — **Energy & Utilities**: 8.1 (matched via tags).

## Agent readiness — 1.5 (human-only)

| Dimension | Value |
|---|---|
| Spec Presence | no |
| Agentic Access | no |
| Reversibility Documented | no |
| MCP Server | no |
| Auth Clarity | no |
| Idempotency | no |
| Error Semantics | no |
| OpenAPI Examples | documented |
| Rate Limit Signal | no |
| Event Surface Described | no |
| Agent Skills | no |
| Well Known Catalog | no |
| Consent Identity | no |
| Agent Card | no |
| Dry Run Mode | no |

## Access

Unknown — onboarding: unknown, pricing: unknown, trial: no (confidence: low).

## APIs (6)

- **Descartes Labs Platform (Archived)** — The historical Descartes Labs Platform — a managed geospatial data refinery and analytics environment exposing imagery catalog, raster access, vector tables, compute functions, ...
- **Descartes Labs Catalog API** — The Catalog organised all imagery and derived data on the Platform. Products group Bands which group Images; Storage Blobs hold arbitrary file artefacts; Events emit notificatio...
- **Descartes Labs Compute API** — The Compute service ran user-supplied Python code as containerised Functions against the imagery archive at scale. Users defined a `Function` (CPUs, memory, environment, Docker ...
- **Descartes Labs Vector API** — The Vector service hosted tabular and geospatial feature data as Tables of typed columns with `uuid` identifiers and ipyleaflet visualisation. Supported property filtering (incl...
- **Descartes Labs Dynamic Compute API** — Dynamic Compute was the Platform's lazy map-computation engine for interactive raster algebra and tile rendering in notebooks. Expressions over imagery products (band math, mosa...
- **Descartes Labs Auth API** — The Auth module handled token-based authentication against app.descarteslabs.com — OAuth login flow, refresh tokens, and the user namespace claim that served as a global identif...

## Security (1)

- **Descartes Labs Domain Security** — TLSv1.3 · DMARC

## Tags

Geospatial, Geospatial Intelligence, Earth Observation, Satellite Imagery, Remote Sensing, Raster, Vectors, GIS, Machine-Learning, Geospatial Analytics, Agriculture, Mining, Energy, Defense, Climate, Acquired, EarthOne, EarthDaily, Discontinued

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Profiled by [API Evangelist](https://apievangelist.com) and published on [APIs.io](https://apis.io/providers/descartes-labs/). Scores are computed from the provider's own public artifacts under a published rubric.