BlackSky Global Appoints Rakesh Narasimhan as Executive Vice President and GM

Seattle, Wash.,  July 20, 2015 – BlackSky Global, a satellite imaging-as-a-service company, announced today that it has tapped software and services veteran Rakesh Narasimhan as its executive vice president and general manager to lead engineering, sales, marketing and operations for its web scale satellite imagery data platform, effective immediately.

Rakesh Narasimhan

“Rakesh brings a stellar track record of building software teams, products and businesses and is ideally suited to lead our team and build that platform,” said Jason Andrews, CEO of Spaceflight Industries, the parent company to BlackSky Global. 

Narasimhan has held a range of executive leadership positions at Microsoft’s Azure as well as Server and Tools businesses.  Most recently Rakesh, as group vice president and general manager at CITRIX, oversaw the development and introduction of Citrix Desktop & App Workspace Cloud Services in addition to growing an Enterprise software portfolio exceeding US$ 1.5 Billion.

Narasimhan’s addition to BlackSky Global follows its June announcement to provide high-resolution images of the globe. The company also announced key partnerships with commercial imagery intelligence provider AllSource Analysis and information technologies provider Hexagon Geospatial in June.

“The personal computer, Internet and mobile devices have re-imagined prevailing architectures to dramatically accelerate a whole industry of innovations due to their introduction. Satellites are about to go through a similar transformation and BlackSky is squarely in the middle of democratizing access to satellite imagery,” Narasimhan said.