Beyond Reach Labs, a startup building hardware to help satellite operators deploy large solar arrays, announced a $10M seed round today to meet an expected massive wave of incoming demand.
Interlagos led the round, which included additional participation from TerraForge Capital, Off-Piste Capital, Y Combinator, and Augur VC.
Al dente: Beyond Reach was founded in 2023 to commercialize a technology that has its roots in a NASA grant intended to support large scale space structures. The idea took off, however, when Beyond Reach joined Y Combinator’s Winter 2026 cohort and narrowed its focus—at least in the short term—on solar arrays.
No matter how lofty the space industry’s dreams get, the reality of spaceflight remains limited by size, weight, and power (SWaP) constraints. As space organizations begin designing larger, more complex spacecraft—from commercial space stations to in-orbit data centers—the solar arrays required to power these technologies have become unwieldy.
Today’s solar-array tech faces an upper limit, according to officials at Beyond Reach: larger arrays make the spacecraft more susceptible to vibrations as the craft maneuvers and passes through wild temperature swings. But making arrays more rigid—to avoid vibrations—often means increasing the spacecraft’s weight, threatening the bottom line.
Beyond Reach’s remedy is a patented solar array deployer that can stretch 100 m long, and flat pack into a typical launch fairing, thus solving the SWaP conundrum.
“The designs we’ve patented, basically [are] all fundamentally to solve the same problems of how to get something to be super long and not like a floppy noodle,” CTO and cofounder Pele Collins told Payload.
Scaling up: Beyond Reach aims to have its system flight-qualified by the end of the year. The aggressive timeline is due, in large part, to the wave of customer demand after the company demoed its tech at Y Combinator in March.
Since then, Beyond Reach has signed $342.6M in LOIs with future customers, and the company has paid pilots underway, according to CEO Mitchell Fogelson. This week, Beyond Reach opened a new 16,000 sq. ft. facility in Brooklyn, NY, to begin churning out hardware at scale, with goals to produce 10+ units a day by the end of 2027.
“We’re going to execute at an incredible speed, and deployable solar arrays will feel like valves or motors. No one’s doing their [own] specialized sub components there. They just want an outlet to plug into. They just want a power source,” Fogelson said.
What’s next: While Beyond Reach is focused on solving the solar power problem for spacecraft in orbit, its long-term vision includes expanding into different deployment products to support other large-scale space infrastructure projects—even on the Moon.
“We’re just starting with power,” Fogelson said. “We see ourselves growing into other services and products, whether it’s deployable radiators or structures…a lot of things in space get better as they get bigger, and we [plan to] become the architects for next-generation, large space systems.”
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