Two innovative data providers, TellusLabs and Orbital Insight, have partnered with CME to distribute their data to market participants.

TellusLabs, a Boston-based company founded in 2016, uses a combination of satellite imagery and artificial intelligence to analyze crop conditions. By scanning daily images from space and measuring the wavelengths of the light absorbed and reflected by plants, the company can assess how well the crops are growing and make predictions about end-of-season harvests. The company currently offers indices for corn and soybean production in the U.S., Brazil and Argentina, which should be particularly useful for traders and other participants in CME's grains and oilseeds markets. Through the partnership, customers can obtain data going back 15 years for the U.S. and six years for Brazil and Argentina

"TellusLabs will be working with CME Group to increase access to TellusLabs CHI and NDVI metrics," the company said. "TL CHI and NDVI are satellite-based scores of plant condition and progress that commodities researchers can use to understand the status of a given crop. They represent a new suite of signals for grains and oilseeds."

In the case of Orbital Insight, the partnership is focused on its energy product, which provides a daily indication of crude oil inventory on a global, regional or country-wide scale. The company uses artificial intelligence to analyze images of storage tanks that have floating roofs. As the amount of oil in those tanks go up and down, the roofs rise and fall. The company uses that information to estimate the amount in inventory worldwide, giving traders valuable insights on the fundamentals of the oil business.

In both cases, the datasets are available through CME's Datamine, a cloud-based service that provides historical market data from CME's futures and options markets. Datamine allows data users to subscribe to the content they want and access it instantly through web interfaces and APIs.In the case of Orbital Insight, the partnership is focused on its energy product, which provides a daily indication of crude oil inventory on a global, regional or country-wide scale. The company uses artificial intelligence to analyze images of storage tanks that have floating roofs. As the amount of oil in those tanks go up and down, the roofs rise and fall. The company uses that information to estimate the amount in inventory worldwide, giving traders valuable insights on the fundamentals of the oil business.