James is the founder of Orbital Insight. Since 2013 the company has been pursuing the mission of processing geospatial data at petabyte scale to help commercial and government customers understand what we are doing on and to the Earth. In 2024 the company was acquired by Privateer Space and has since operated as a fully owned subsidiary. In addition to being the founder of Orbital Insight, James also works as Chief Strategy Officer for the combined company.

Previously he was SVP of Science and Engineering at the Climate Corporation through its $1B acquisition by Monsanto.  Before his time at Climate he was CTO and Software Architect at Moon Express -- a company with the goal of putting the first commercial robot on the Moon.  Previous to that he was engineering Director of Google Book Search where he was in charge of Google's project to scan, index, and make searchable the world's books.

James holds PhD and Master’s degrees in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin, and a BA in Math and Computer Science from Rice University.