The founder and CEO of Orbital Images saw an untapped potential in the increase of surveillance hardware and decided to create software to analyze the images.

With the world of drones on the rise—federal regulators expect the industry to expand into a $90 billion business, compared to an estimated $720 million in sales last year—Orbital's goal is to capture global socioeconomic trends and sell it to hedge funds, real estate developers and other organizations.

"The really exciting thing about today's world and about what's going on in satellite imagery is that more and more satellites are being launched," Crawford told CNBC's "Closing Bell" in a recent interview. His company has "processed as many as a million images of parking lots. From that volume of imagery we can actually learn a great deal," he said.