Summer has now given way to fall — and what was supposed to be biotechnology’s sleepiest season turned out to be a monster, and fascinating too.

Here are the top 12 companies raising capital and making huge deals and advances this season.

#12.

Descartes Labs. In August, we reported that Descartes Labs raised $30M in its Series B round led by March Capital with Cargill, Crosslink Capital, and Cultivian Sandbox also on-board. The Descartes Labs Platform is the missing link in making satellite imagery useful. We collect data daily from public and commercial imagery providers, clean it, calibrate it, and store it in an easy-to-access file system, ready for scientific analysis. Currently, the Descartes Labs Platform ingests 5 terabytes (TB) of near real-time data per day, roughly equivalent to 5,000 hours of standard video. Our current corpus is over 5 petabytes of data (5,000 TB) with the ability to grow much larger. With sensor data growing exponentially, the Descartes Labs Platform is designed to respond elastically to this data explosion and harness it for real-time analysis.