2026 has started off strong with large funding rounds—and things aren’t slowing down as we head into the second month of the year.
Yesterday, spacecom company CesiumAstro announced that it closed a $270M round of funding—which will help the company to cement further contracts in the defense sector, and build out its natsec business.
The company pulled in a total of $470M, which was split into two buckets:
- A $270M equity round led by Trousdale Ventures, which included participation from Woven Capital, Janus Henderson Investors, Airbus Ventures, the Development Bank of Japan, MESH, EDBI, and NewSpace Capital, as well as unnamed investors.
- A $200M batch of financing from the Export-Import Bank of the United States (EXIM) and JP Morgan, which the company announced last month.
“Our technology is moving from breakthrough to American industrial backbone,” CEO Shey Sabripour said in a release. “This funding lets us deliver resilient, AI-enabled communications to ‘connect, detect and defend’ at global scale—faster.”
The equity round brings the company’s total venture funding to upwards of $420M since 2017, including the last financing round, a $65M Series B+ in June 2024 that was also led by Trousdale Ventures.
The defense angle: CesiumAstro built its business on its communications terminals—meaning, the pieces of equipment that allow satellites to communicate with one another and with the ground. But lately, along with the rest of the space industry, the company has been placing a greater emphasis on how its tech can support national security needs for the US.
Supporting defense-geared constellations like the SDA’s Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture is part of that mission, and the company’s release said that it is “positioned to play a central role in proliferated space and defense networks.”
Joining the pack: Cesium is joining a crowded field of companies announcing major funding rounds in the early days of 2026.
- Northwood Space raised a $100M Series B;
- Hydrosat raised a $60M Series B;
- D-Orbit raised a $53M funding round;
- Samara Aerospace raised a $10M seed round.
These millions of dollars flowing into the space sector are signs that investors are once again enthusiastic about the growth potential of the industry—and particularly interested in backing hardware-heavy companies with an entry point for the defense sector.
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AI is everywhere these days—even on Mars.
Engineers at JPL announced Friday that they had successfully used Anthropic’s AI model, called Claude, to map a 450-meter Martian path for NASA’s Perseverance rover.
The demonstration in December has big implications for the future of deep space missions. Engineers estimate that using Claude to map Martian journeys in the future will cut route-planning time in half. The technology could increase the viability of uncrewed journeys to more distant destinations that have a longer comms lag—such as Europa or Titan, the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, respectively.
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