Tuesday, September 1, 2020

Hydrosat Founder, JPL and Techstars Alum Jakob vanZyl Dies

Jakob vanZyl, the founder and CEO of Hydrosat, one of the companies to emerge out of the 2019 Techstars Starburst Space Accelerator, died last Wednesday, after suffering from a heart attack on August 24th. VanZyl previously had served at NASA's Jet Propulation Laboratory, and was involved in the Juno, Dawn, Cassini, InSight Mars lander, Mars 2020 Perserverance, and other missions. VanZyl was most recently working on Hydrosat, a startup developing satellites to monitor the moisture of every spot on earth, at high resolution, every four days, and had participated in the Techstars Starburst Space Accelerator Demo Day in October of 2019. VanZyl had a 33 year career at JPL, before embarking as a startup founder last year. JPL said that vanZyl was 63.