Startups
Stories about the new players changing the space game.
Exotrail raises $58M for spacestudio, spacedrop, spaceware, and spacetower
Exotrail has raised $58M, the French space logistics provider announced this week. The startup will tap the funds to fuel: The cap table Bpifrance, a French public investment bank, led the $58M Series B round via its SPI and Innovation Defense Funds. Bpifrance had already backed Exotrail through its F3A and Digital Venture investment vehicles…
Orbital Sidekick Raises $10M, Preps for Launch of Hyperspectral Constellation
This week, Orbital Sidekick announced a $10M raise from a group of strategic and existing investors. Energy Innovation Capital led the round, with energy firms Williams and ONEOK participating. The University of Minnesota’s endowment fund, 11.2 Capital, Syndicate 708, and In-Q-Tel also joined the round. Six-year-old, SF-based Orbital Sidekick is preparing to launch a six-bird…
Europe’s Privately Funded Space Capsule Startup Nabs €40.5M in Funding
The Exploration Company has closed a €40.5M Series A. The round follows a €5.3M seed round, closed in November 2021. The Franco-German startup is developing a reusable space capsule, Nyx, that will fly science missions, resupply space stations, and, with any luck, eventually, take crews to and from orbit. The vehicle is designed to carry…
Floodbase Renames and Closes $12M Series A
Floodbase, a Brooklyn, NY-based startup that operates an intelligence engine to help assess and insure flood risk, announced a major rebrand along with a $12M Series A. Lowercarbon Capital led the funding round, with participation from Collaborative Fund, Floating Point and Vidavo. Who’s Floodbase? The artist formerly known as Cloud to Street is working to…
AstroForge Announces Asteroid Mining Test Missions
Could this be the year of asteroid mining? AstroForge, a YC W22 alum based in Huntington Beach, CA, is trying to make it happen. The company announced that it has booked two missions this year to get its asteroid mining tech to orbit and tested as quickly as possible. Mining asteroids: About a decade ago,…
Quindar Closes $2.5M Seed Round
Quindar, a startup building a web app for satellite owners to design, test, and operate their constellations with little to no human intervention, announced this morning the closing of a $2.5M seed round raised from Y Combinator, FCVC, Soma Capital, and Liquid 2 Ventures. “One of the value propositions of being an aerospace company with…
Stell Raises $3.1M Pre-Seed for Aerospace Workflow Platform
Stell, a startup building an efficient workflow platform for the aerospace industry, announced this morning the closing of a $3.1M pre-seed round led by Wischoff Ventures and Third Prime VC. The comms problem: When it comes to communicating the deeply complex, technical information critical to aerospace engineering, a lot can get lost in translation. “The…
SkyFi Launches Satellite Imagery App
SkyFi believes that satellite imagery should be easily accessible and affordable for anyone to access. Today, the Austin, TX startup took a major step toward democratizing that data with the public launch of its mobile and web apps. The story so far: SkyFi built an entirely new app and interface for individuals to task satellites…
Astranis Taps Doug Abts to Scale Commercial Sales
Doug Abts is joining Astranis’s C-suite as its new chief commercial officer. Abts, a former Navy SEAL and grad of Harvard Business School, comes to Astranis by way of Viasat, where he was GM of the publicly traded company’s in-flight connectivity (IFC) business. Abts grew Viasat’s IFC biz into a “multi-hundred million dollar in annual…
Exclusive: Quub Emerges from Stealth Mode, Announces Two Air Force Contracts
Today, satellite startup Quub emerged from stealth mode with two Air Force contracts in tow. Pronounced like “cube,” the Lancaster, PA-based startup bills itself as a “data company,” placing an emphasis on the value of its eventual downstream analytics products. But don’t get it twisted—Quub is taking a verticalized approach to Earth observation (EO) and…
Exclusive: Magnestar Raises $1.1M for RF Interference Tracking
Magnestar, a new startup based in Toronto, has raised a $1.1M pre-seed round to kickstart the development of a platform to help satellite operators predict and avoid potential radiofrequency (RF) interference. 1862 Capital, the Business Development Bank of Canada, BoxOne Ventures, and Entrepreneur First participated in the round. With its platform, Magnestar hopes to give…
Neuraspace, Ienai Space and EnduroSat Partner on STM Mission
Neuraspace, Ienai Space, and EnduroSat announced this morning that they have formed a partnership to demonstrate their end-to-end space traffic management (STM) capabilities. The companies say this will be the first European mission dedicated to performing collision avoidance maneuvers. “I’m really hoping that efforts like our own will help us avoid negative approaches to sustainability…
NorthStar Closes $35M Series C
NorthStar Earth and Space, a Canadian startup building a constellation for in-situ space situational awareness (SSA), announced this morning it has closed a $35M Series C. New York-based PE shop Cartesian led the round. The round also included participation from Telesystem Space Inc., the Luxembourg Future Fund, the government of Quebec, and the Luxembourg Space…
