Karman+, a CO-based asteroid mining startup, has raised $20M in seed financing to continue the development of its first demo mission—High Frontier—which is set to launch in February 2027.
UK-based Plural and Belgium-based Hummingbird led the round, with additional input from HCVC, Kevin Mahaffey, and Karman+ co-founder and CEO Teun van den Dries.
The opportunity: Multiple civil space agencies have made recent trips to asteroids—but those come with a hefty price tag.
- JAXA’s Hayabusa-2 mission, which returned samples from the Ryugu asteroid in 2020, cost an estimated $250M.
- NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission, which returned samples from the Bennu asteroid in 2023, cost ~$1.16B.
Karman+ is betting it can achieve similar results with drastically less capital.
“We looked at the list of materials for [Hayabusa-2] and threw out everything that we felt we didn’t need,” van den Dries told Payload. “Our initial budget goal was $25M. We dropped that to $20M, and then, last year, decided to drop it to $10M. Our first mission will be a little bit more expensive, but that’s been the cost curve on the supply side.”
The company has been able to achieve these cost reductions by building otherwise expensive parts in-house and outsourcing the rest. Karman+ estimates that it developed ~80% of its spacecraft in-house.
Lessons learned: Karman+ has also benefited from the lessons learned on earlier asteroid sample return missions by hiring members of the original OSIRIS-REx team, and giving them the freedom to innovate.
“We were able to find and bring across some of the key folks that worked on enabling technology that made OSIRIS-REx possible. If you approach it differently—not the Lockheed way—you can actually do that 10 or 100 times faster and cheaper and get a much better outcome,” van den Dries said.
The model: Its first mission in 2027 will hitch a ride on SpaceX’s Transporter-19 rideshare to LEO before powering itself to a near-Earth asteroid. High Frontier will aim to demonstrate the company’s ability to fly in space, rendezvous with an asteroid, and mine ~1kg of material.
Its early business model depends on its ability to process material in space and use the output to refuel spacecraft in orbit.
Karman+ has tested this capability in the lab, but during its second mission—also expected to fly in 2027—the company hopes to put that refueling capability to work for paying customers.
“Refueling is still an unresolved puzzle…but the idea of extending life of assets, especially in GEO, is something that has seen a ton of demand, so we have various customers in that group,” van den Dries said.
What’s next: The company aims to launch four more spacecraft in 2028, and eight the following year, with the eventual goal of offering broad asteroid resource utilization capabilities to support in-space servicing, manufacturing, R&D, and the potential sale of space resources back on Earth.
“There’s an initial market that we think will require at least tens of these spacecraft working concurrently. If we can refuel our customers, we can also refuel ourselves, and that allows for reusability in orbit. It’s not something that, at this stage, we’re assuming will work immediately, but clearly a goal in terms of scaling for the long term,” van den Dries said.
