On Thursday, California space startup LeoLabs, a conspicuous early mover in the next-generation mapping services called space situational awareness (SSA) for the low Earth orbit (LEO) economy, announced a new round of venture funding. The $65 million Series B round, with lead investor Insight Partners, a private equity firm from New York, joining founding investor Velvet Sea Ventures, bringing LeoLabs above $100 million in capital raised to date.
The company, which was founded in 2016 as a venture-funded spinout of Silicon Valley research institute SRI International, today provides critical mapping and SSA services for space agencies, commercial satellite operators, defense clients, and scientific and academic organizations.
Calling the round “a testament” to his firm’s mission “to inform, secure and enable the revolution of services entering low Earth orbit,” LeoLabs CEO and co-founder Dan Ceperley said the new funds would be used to accelerate the global rollout of its next-generation radars to track small debris and satellites in LEO, and to expand development of its LEO mapping and SSA platform, which are offered as a subscription service to clients.
As Low Earth Orbit has rapidly commercialized, bringing governments, space agencies, regulators, companies, and space insurers into an entirely new and hitherto nonpublic domain, LeoLabs says two critical challenges to the nascent space economy have emerged. First is the threat of space debris, of which 250,000 separate orbital pieces have gone untracked by legacy government systems, posing a safety risk to new satellite constellations being launched and to the sustainable development of the LEO space as a whole. Second is the lack of threat-tracking in LEO, as the number of space-faring nations and private space operators continues to grow.
Sustainability in space
“The single greatest challenge to both the sustainability and security threats in LEO is solving the data deficit,” said LeoLabs’ Ceperley in announcing the round on Thursday. “The number of assets in LEO doubled last year, will double again this year, and is expected to grow 25x in the next five years. LeoLabs is already the largest provider of data for LEO today, and this lead will expand rapidly as we execute on our constellation of radars.
“The legacy government-built SSA infrastructures of the past simply cannot scale to track the new levels of LEO activity, and they have no path to get there. Our market-driven infrastructure is the only viable and scalable way to address this data deficit,” Ceperley added.
LeoLabs plans to upscale its total number of radar sites this year, establishing a “global constellation” of ground-based radars. The company also plans to expand its SaaS offering.
“We are excited about LeoLabs’ vision and the progress they’ve made on both the radar network and the SSA platform,” said Nick Sinai, Senior Advisor at Insight Partners, who will join the LeoLabs board.”LeoLabs is uniquely positioned to deliver the data, analytics, and software that government and commercial customers need to understand where satellites and debris are at all times. We are thrilled to back an all-star team at LeoLabs as they develop the leading space awareness software company.”
“As one of the first investors in LeoLabs, I have watched the team build an end-to-end solution, from radars to its platform that makes mission critical analytics available and actionable as a commercial off-the-shelf service to any company interested in leveraging low-earth orbit solutions as a growth driver,” said John Giampetroni, Managing Partner of Velvet Sea Ventures and LeoLabs angel investor. “Their vision for the future of the commercial space industry and their ability to execute on that vision makes LeoLabs a formidable industry leader.”
Earlier this spring, LeoLabs announced the rollout of its Costa Rica Space Radar, a phased-array radar providing equatorial coverage for low inclination orbits, giving the company full coverage of LEO, and allowing the company to track objects (including active satellites and orbital debris) down to 2cm in size. These objects represent the majority of risk in LEO.
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