There’s a new space technology specialist fund in town. Today, Stellar Ventures announced the close of $23M in committed capital for SV Andromeda Fund LP, its first fund.
Stellar Ventures may ring a bell for seasoned space hands. It sounds like Stellar Solutions, an aerospace engineering company, and that’s no coincidence. Celeste Ford started both (Stellar Solutions est. 1995, Stellar Ventures earlier this year). She’ll be deploying capital alongside managing director Matt Patterson and operating partner David Anderman.
Anderman told Payload that the trio “kicked it off in earnest last summer,” with much of the capital raise occurring in the last six months or so. Not bad for first-time fund managers…and in this economy? “We feel fortunate to actually have some dry powder to deploy in this market,” Anderman said.
Anderman was formerly COO and general counsel at Lucasfilm, where he oversaw the company’s sale to Disney in 2012. After stints in VR and at various startups, he cold-emailed Elon Musk and eventually landed the GC position at SpaceX, where he worked on launching Starlink.
“I went from fictional space to real space,” Anderman said.
The ABCs of Andromeda
The fund is focused on seed and early-stage teams building constellations, laser links, software stacks, edge computing solutions, positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT) services, and space communications products.
- Existing portcos: The fund has already backed Xona Space Systems, Skyloom, Firehawk, Airflow, SatelliteVu, Cosmic Shielding Corporation, Corvus Robotics, ShadowBreak Intl, and BreachBits (per its website).
- Founders of focus: “I’ve never seen any other company work as quickly as SpaceX does,” Anderman said. With a nod to the SpaceX mafia, he noted that “there’s a whole group of entrepreneurs that come out of that company and are starting a whole series of other startups.”
- A distinctive edge: Ford’s background “gives us unparalleled deal flow and due diligence opportunities,” Anderman said. As the new VCs note in a statement, Stellar Solutions has access to former astronauts, admirals, generals, and engineering whizzes aplenty.
Closing thoughts? Like others in the industry, the Stellar Ventures team compares the current state of space to the early internet days. “At some point, people are going to come up with crazy ideas that we’ve never even thought of,” Anderman said. “Unbelievable ideas that are just…literally going back to science fiction, going back to my roots, right?”
