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Near Space Labs closes $13M Series A to send more Earth-imaging robots to the stratosphere
The decreasing cost of launch and a slew of other tech innovations have brought about a renaissance in geospatial intelligence, with multiple startups aiming to capture higher-quality and more frequent images of Earth than have ever before been available.
Most of these startups, however, are focused on using satellites to collect data. Not so for Near Space Labs, a four-year-old company that instead aims to gather geospatial intelligence from the stratosphere, using small autonomous wind-powered robots attached to weather balloons. The company has named its platform “Swifty,” and each one is capable of reaching altitudes between 60,000 and 85,000 feet and capturing 400-1,000 square kilometers of imagery per flight.
The company was founded in 2017 by Rema Matevosyan, Ignasi Lluch and Albert Caubet. Matevosyan, who is an applied mathematician by training and previously worked as a programmer, did her masters in Moscow. There, she started doing research in systems engineering for aerospace systems and also flew weather balloons to test aerospace hardware. “It clicked that we can fly balloons commercially and deliver a much better experience to customers than from any other alternative,” she told TechCrunch in a recent interview.
Four years after launch, the company has closed a $13 million Series A round led by Crosslink Capital, with participation from Toyota Ventures and existing investors Leadout Capital and Wireframe Ventures. Near Space Labs also announced that Crosslink partner Phil Boyer has joined its board.
Near Space, which is headquartered in Brooklyn and Barcelona, Spain, is primarily focused on urbanized areas where change happens very rapidly. The robotic devices that attach to the balloons are manufactured at the company’s workshop in Brooklyn, which are then shipped to launch sites across the country. The company’s CTO and chief engineer are both based in Barcelona, so the hardware R&D takes place over there, Matevosyan explained.
The company currently has eight Swifies in operation. It sells the data it collects and has developed an API through which customers can access the data via a subscription model. The company doesn’t need to have specific launch sites — Matevosyan said Swifties can launch from “anywhere at any time” — but the company does work in concert with the Federal Aviation Administration and air traffic control.
The main value proposition of the Swifty as opposed to the satellite, according to Matevosyan, is the resolution: From the stratosphere, the company can collect “resolutions that are 50 times better than what you would get from a satellite,” she said. “We are able to provide persistent and near real-time coverage of areas of interest that change very quickly, including large metro areas.” Plus, she said Near Space can iterate it’s technology quickly using Swifties’ “plug-and-play” model, whereas it’s not so easy to add a new sensor to a satellite fleet that’s already in orbit.
Near Space Labs founders (from left): Ignasi Lluch, Rema Matevosyan and Albert Caubet. Image Credits: Near Space Labs (opens in a new window)
Near Space has booked more than 540 flights through 2022. While customers pay for the flights, the data generated from each trip is non-exclusive, so the data can be sold again and again. Looking ahead, the company will be using the funds to expand its geographical footprint and bring on a bunch of new hires. The goal, according to Matevosyan, is to democratize access to geospatial intelligence — not just for customers, but on the developer side, too. “We believe in diverse, equal and inclusive opportunities in aerospace and Earth imaging,” she said.
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Aurora Propulsion Technologies closes €1.7M seed for spacecraft maneuvering and deorbiting tech
More spacecraft will be sent to orbit this year than ever before in human history, and the number of satellite launches is only anticipated to increase through the rest of the decade. Under these crowded conditions, being able to maneuver satellites in space and deorbit them when they reach the end of their useful life will be key.
Enter Aurora Propulsion Technologies. It’s one of a handful of startups that has emerged in the past few years to help simplify the problem of spacecraft propulsion. Since its founding in 2018, the Finnish company has developed two products — a tiny thruster engine and a plasma braking system — and will be testing both in an in-orbit demonstration in the fourth quarter of this year. Aurora’s activities have caught the eye of investors: the company just closed a €1.7 million ($2 million) seed round to bring its technology to market.
The round was led by Lithuanian VC firm Practica Capital, with additional participation from the state-owned private equity company TESI (Finnish Industry Investment Ltd.) and The Flying Object, a fund from Kluz Ventures. Individual investors also participated.
Aurora’s first in-orbit demonstration, Aurora Sat-1, will be heading to space on a Rocket Lab rideshare mission, the company announced last month. On that satellite will be two modules. The first module will contain six Aurora “resistojet” engines, designed to help small spacecraft adjust their attitude (the satellite’s orientation, not its mood) and de-tumble. Aurora will also test its Plasma Brake technology, which could be used to de-orbit satellites or even to conduct deep space missions.
Each resistojet thruster comes in at just around one centimeter long, and it moves the spacecraft using microliters of water and propellant. The six thrusters are distributed around the satellite in such a way to facilitate movement in virtually any direction, and the thruster can also modulate the temperature of the water and the strength of the puff of steam that’s discharged to generate movement.
Image Credits: Aurora Propulsion Technologies (opens in a new window)
Aurora CEO Roope Takala, who previously worked for Nokia, likened the innovations in weight and size in the space industry — which we see in the resistojet — to what happened to cell phones and computers 20 years ago. “The industry moves very slow,” he said in a recent interview with TechCrunch. “In the old space era, it took a quarter to develop a rocket engine — that would be a quarter of a century. Now, it takes two quarters of a year. That’s what we did.”
The Plasma Brake uses an electrically charged microtether to generate a lump of protons to generate drag. That’s ideal for de-orbiting a spacecraft, but interestingly (and counterintuitively), the Plasma Brake could also be used for traveling away from the planet, Takala said. That’s because when you go outside the Earth’s magnetosphere, the Plasma Brake becomes unstable and moves with solar wind (which is also plasma). “The same product can jump onto that flow of plasma from the sun and extract energy from that,” Takala explained. “In that context we can use it as an interplanetary traveling tool.”
Theoretically, if a spacecraft was equipped with multiple tethers extending different directions, it could be used to rotate and guide the spacecraft, like a sailboat, he added. This technology is only scalable to a certain degree, however, so don’t expect it to be sending a crewed spacecraft into deep space anytime soon. That’s mostly due to limitations in the material strength of the Plasma Brake tethers, but the tech can be used for satellites up to around 1,000 kilograms.
“That’s our future. That’s where we’re aiming,” Takala said. “We’re focused now for the short term on low Earth orbit with the Plasma Brake and the attitude control [resistojet], and later on when the moon businesses kick off as they are slowly starting to do, then we’ll probably be looking at that way.”
The Plasma Brake and resistojet thruster would need to be put on spacecraft before they launch to orbit, but Aurora is in conversation with other companies of the potential of in-orbit installation of Plasma Brakes for existing space junk. Looking to the short term, the company is going to use the funding to productize the technology for low Earth orbit and to serialize its production, as well as to add features to the products to equip them for satellites larger than CubeSats.
In the longer term, Aurora has a vision of conducting missions in deep space. “We started off from the idea that we want to make a technology that fits into a really small spacecraft, [and] travels really fast so that we can catch up with the Voyager probes,” Takala said.
“First to the moon and then to Mars, Venus, and then one day we may be able to catch up with the Voyagers and take a big trip.”
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Aerospace primes Northrop, Lockheed join in Orbit Fab’s over $10M funding round
San Francisco-based startup Orbit Fab wants to be the go-to source for orbital refueling, and now it has raised over $10 million in its quest to get there. The money will go toward funding a refueling trial that’s due to launch as early as the end of 2022, in which the company plans to send to space two refueling shuttles that will repeatedly perform a three-step dock, transfer fuel and undock process.
The round was led by Asymmetry Ventures, with participation from existing investor SpaceFund and new investors Marubeni Ventures and Audacious Venture Partners. Notably, both Northrop Grumman Corporation and Lockheed Martin Ventures also participated, the first time the two contractor-rivals have done an investment together, Orbit Fab co-founder Jeremy Schiel told TechCrunch.
“We are the tide that raises all boats,” Schiel said. “We don’t give either a competitive edge, but we can as a whole have better alternatives for sustainability in space.”
“Getting [the two primes] to play nice with each other,” as he put it, is key for the company, which wants to position itself as the favored source for space refueling. Orbit Fab, which was a finalist in our TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield in 2019, has developed a refueling valve it calls RAFTI (Rapid Attachable Fluid Transfer Interface) — but this component must be installed before spacecraft leave Earth, which means that much of the buy-in from major customers like the aerospace contractors must occur before their satellites even enter orbit.
The idea is that spacecraft outfitted with RAFTI would be able to dock with one of Orbit Fab’s refueling shuttles, which would be positioned in low Earth orbit, geostationary orbit and eventually even cis-lunar space. By 2025, Schiel said he hopes every spacecraft will have a RAFTI on it. In the long-term, the company is thinking even bigger: producing fuel in-space, using material mined from asteroids.
“We want to be the Dow Chemical of space,” Schiel said. “We want to be the first customers for lunar miners, asteroid miners, buying up their material that they mined off those bodies, and then convert that to usable propellants that we can produce in-orbit.”
Orbit Fab says orbital refueling will be the bedrock of the burgeoning new space economy, in which goods and spacecraft will need to be transferred from one orbit to another (a maneuver that’s extremely fuel-intensive), or to build out supply chains to return resources to Earth.
“We want to be that supply chain of propellant,” Schiel added.
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Dawn Aerospace conducts five flights of its suborbital spaceplane
While the rocket launch sector is quickly becoming crowded, the same can’t be said for companies developing suborbital spaceplanes. This means there’s plenty of room to grow for startups like Dawn Aerospace, which has now completed five test flights of its Mk-II Aurora spaceplane that is designed to fly up to 60 miles above the Earth’s surface.
The flights, which took place at the Glentanner Aerodrome in New Zealand’s South Island in July, were to assess the vehicle’s airframe and avionics. While the vehicle only reached altitudes of 3,400 feet, the flights allowed Dawn’s team to capture “extensive data enabling further R&D on the capability of Mk-II,” CEO Stefan Powell said in a statement.
Image Credits: Dawn Aerospace (opens in a new window)
Dawn’s approach is to build a vehicle that can take off and land from conventional airports and potentially perform multiple flights to and from space per day. The obvious benefit of this approach is that it’s significantly less capital-intensive than vertical launches. Mk-II is also barely the size of a compact car, less than 16 feet long and weighing only 165 pounds empty, which further lowers costs.
As the name suggests, the Mk-II is the second iteration of the vehicle, but Dawn doesn’t plan on stopping there. The company has plans to build a two-stage-to-orbit Mk-III spaceplane that can also be used to conduct scientific research, or even capture atmospheric data for weather observations and climate modeling. While Mk-II has a payload of 3U, or less than 8.8 pounds, Mk-III will be capable of carrying up to 551 pounds to orbit.
The Mk-II will ultimately be fitted with a rocket engine to enable supersonic performance and high-altitude testing.
The company hit a major milestone last December when it received an Unmanned Aircraft Operator Certificate from the New Zealand Civil Aviation Authority to fly Mk-II from airports. It also received a grant from by the province of Zuid-Holland in the Netherlands, along with Radar Based Avionics and MetaSensing, to test a low-power sense and detect radar system. That demonstration, which is scheduled to take place next year, will happen once Mk-II undergoes some minor modifications, Powell told TechCrunch.
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Equity Monday: Stocks up, cryptos up, regulation up
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.
This is Equity Monday, our weekly kickoff that tracks the latest private market news, talks about the coming week, digs into some recent funding rounds and mulls over a larger theme or narrative from the private markets. You can follow the show on Twitter here. I also tweet.
Today’s show was good fun to put together. Here’s what we got to:
- Global stocks are up to kick off the week. It’s a great way to start Monday, frankly.
- Thinking broadly, the latest regulatory news from China regarding ByteDance is not super bullish for the nation’s tech industry. And what the Indian government is doing to its own technology industry is not encouraging. But all of that and tension between the two countries is not stopping deals. You can’t stop deals!
- Facebook bowed to pressure, and released a content report that it had previously shelved.
- Zetwerk raised a $150 million Series E. The Indian startup scene is trucking right along, perhaps acting a bit as if its government wasn’t increasingly authoritarian.
- Shelf.io raised a $52.5 million Series B in what we’re somewhat considering a classic Tiger-led deal.
- And the SPAC boom is not over yet, with yet another Virgin space company headed for the public markets.
Woo! And that’s the start to the week. Hugs from here, and we’ll chat you on Wednesday!
Equity drops every Monday at 7:00 a.m. PST, Wednesday, and Friday at 6:00 a.m. PST, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts!
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Space manufacturing startup Varda inks deal with Rocket Lab for three spacecraft
Orbital manufacturing startup Varda Space Industries is moving fast. Only a few weeks after announcing a $42 million Series A, Varda has signed a deal with launch company Rocket Lab for three Photon spacecraft to support the startup’s initial missions.
The first spacecraft will be delivered in the first quarter of 2023, with the second to follow later that year and the third in 2024. It’s an aggressive schedule for the eight-month-old Varda and would mark the company’s first three manufacturing missions to space. The contract includes an option for Varda to purchase a fourth Photon.
Partnering with a more established company makes sense — especially considering the Photon’s bona fides, which includes a NASA-funded mission to the moon at the end of the year. Rocket Lab was also awarded a subcontract by the University of California Berkeley Space Sciences Laboratory to design two Photon spacecraft for a one-year mission to Mars.
Image Credits: Rocket Lab (opens in a new window)
Varda, which was founded by SpaceX veteran Will Bruey and Founders Fund principal Delian Asparouhov, is banking big on a manufacturing condition that you can only find in space: microgravity. They think that the potential market for bioprinted organs, specialized semiconductors, fiber-optic cables or pharmaceuticals — products that you can’t make in Earthbound-conditions — is high enough to make the costs of building a spacecraft and launching to space more than worth it.
Under this most recent deal, each Photon will be outfitted with two Varda-made modules: The first will be a microgravity manufacturing module, where the space production will actually take place, and the second will be a reentry capsule designed to bring those finished products back to Earth. Asparouhov told TechCrunch that the are designing the reentry modules to bring back “on the order of 40-60 kilograms of materials” for the first couple of missions, with the aim of quickly scaling up for subsequent launches.
Varda says this approach is low-risk and incremental. “That’s why we’re seeing so much interest from the investment community, [the Department of Defense], NASA, et cetera, it’s this very pragmatic, one-step-at-a-time approach,” Asparouhov said. “We’ll prove this first space factory. And yes, as we start to scale it allows us to send a larger space factory and then eventually, yes, we might have something the size of the [International Space Station], 10 times the size of the ISS. But that’s not what we’re starting with. We’re starting with a very small, near-term pragmatic approach.”
Each mission will last roughly three months from launch to landing, Rocket Lab said in a statement.
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SpaceX to acquire satellite connectivity startup Swarm Technologies
SpaceX will be acquiring satellite connectivity startup Swarm Technologies, the first such deal for the 19-year-old space company headed by Elon Musk.
Swarm operates a constellation of 120 sandwich-sized satellites as well as a ground station network. The deal would transfer control of Swarm’s ground and space licenses to SpaceX, in addition to any licenses pending before the commission. If the transaction is approved, the startup would become a “direct wholly-owned subsidiary” of the larger company.
The acquisition, which was reported in under-the-radar filings with the Federal Communications Commission, marks a sharp departure from the launch giant’s established strategy of internally developing its tech.
The deal was reportedly reached between the two companies on July 16. The FCC filings do not disclose any financial details or terms of the transaction. Neither SpaceX nor Swarm could be reached for comment.
“Swarm’s services will benefit from the better capitalization and access to resources available to SpaceX, as well as the synergies associated with acquisition by a provider of satellite design, manufacture, and launch services,” the companies said in the filing. For SpaceX’s part, the company will “similarly benefit from access to the intellectual property and expertise developed by the Swarm team, as well as from adding this resourceful and effective team to SpaceX.”
What this means for SpaceX’s operations, particularly its Starlink satellite network, is unclear, as these satellites operate in a different frequency band from that of Swarm. In the short term, Swarm CEO Sara Spangelo told TechCrunch last month that the company is “still marching” toward its goal of operating a 150-satellite constellation.
Compared to SpaceX, Swarm is a relatively new company. It raised a $25 million Series A almost exactly three years ago, in August 2018, but it only went commercially live with its flagship product earlier this year. That product, the Tile, is a small modem that can be embedded in various connectivity devices and linked to the satellite network to allow users a low-cost way to power Internet of Things devices.
Swarm’s Evaluation Kit. Image Credits: Swarm (opens in a new window)
Swarm also launched its second product last month, the $499 Evaluation Kit, an all-in-one package designed to give anyone the ability to create an IoT device using a Tile, a solar panel and a few other components.
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$100M donation powers decade-long moonshot to create solar satellites that beam power to Earth
It sounds like a plan concocted by a supervillain, if that villain’s dastardly end was to provide cheap, clean power all over the world: launch a set of three-kilometer-wide solar arrays that beam the sun’s energy to the surface of the Earth. Even the price tag seems gleaned from pop fiction: one hundred million dollars. But this is a real project at Caltech, funded for a nearly a decade largely by a single donor.
The Space-based Solar Power Project has been underway since at least 2013, when the first donation from Donald and Brigitte Bren came through. Donald Bren is the chairman of Irvine Company and on the Caltech board of trustees, and after hearing about the idea of space-based solar in Popular Science, he proposed to fund a research project at the university — and since then has given more than $100 million for the purpose. The source of the funds has been kept anonymous until this week, when Caltech made it public.
The idea emerges naturally from the current limitations of renewable energy. Solar power is ubiquitous on the surface, but of course highly dependent on the weather, season and time of day. No solar panel, even in ideal circumstances, can work at full capacity all the time, and so the problem becomes one of transferring and storing energy in a smart grid. No solar panel on Earth, that is.
A solar panel in orbit, however, may be exposed to the full light of the sun nearly all the time, and with none of the reduction in its power that comes from that light passing through the planet’s protective atmosphere and magnetosphere.
The latest prototype created by the SSPP, which collects sunlight and transmits it over microwave frequency. Image Credits: Caltech
“This ambitious project is a transformative approach to large-scale solar energy harvesting for the Earth that overcomes this intermittency and the need for energy storage,” said SSPP researcher Harry Atwater in the Caltech release.
Of course, you would need to collect enough energy that it’s worth doing in the first place, and you need a way to beam that energy down to the surface in a way that doesn’t lose most of it to the aforementioned protective layers but also doesn’t fry anything passing through its path.
These fundamental questions have been looked at systematically for the last decade, and the team is clear that without Bren’s support, this project wouldn’t have been possible. Attempting to do the work while scrounging for grants and rotating through grad students might have prevented its being done at all, but the steady funding meant they could hire long-term researchers and overcome early obstacles that might have stymied them otherwise.
The group has produced dozens of published studies and prototypes (which you can peruse here), including the lightest solar collector-transmitter made by an order of magnitude, and is now on the verge of launching its first space-based test satellite.
“[Launch] is currently expected to be Q1 2023,” co-director of the project Ali Hajimiri told TechCrunch. “It involves several demonstrators for space verification of key technologies involved in the effort, namely, wireless power transfer at distance, lightweight flexible photovoltaics and flexible deployable space structures.”
Diagram showing how tiles like the one above could be joined together to form strips, then spacecraft, then arrays of spacecraft. Image Credits: Caltech
These will be small-scale tests (about six feet across), but the vision is for something rather larger. Bigger than anything currently in space, in fact.
“The final system is envisioned to consist of multiple deployable modules in close formation flight and operating in synchronization with one another,” Hajimiri said. “Each module is several tens of meters on the side and the system can be built up by adding more modules over time.”
Image Credits: Caltech
Eventually the concept calls for a structure perhaps as large as 5-6 kilometers across. Don’t worry — it would be far enough out from Earth that you wouldn’t see a giant hexagon blocking out the stars. Power would be sent to receivers on the surface using directed, steerable microwave transmission. A few of these in orbit could beam power to any location on the planet full time.
Of course that is the vision, which is many, many years out if it is to take place at all. But don’t make the mistake of thinking of this as having that single ambitious, one might even say grandiose, goal. The pursuit of this idea has produced advances in solar cells, flexible space-based structures and wireless power transfer, each of which can be applied in other areas. The vision may be the stuff of science fiction, but the science is progressing in a very grounded way.
For his part, Bren seems to be happy just to advance the ball on what he considers an important task that might not otherwise have been attempted at all.
“I have been a student researching the possible applications of space-based solar energy for many years,” he told Caltech. “My interest in supporting the world-class scientists at Caltech is driven by my belief in harnessing the natural power of the sun for the benefit of everyone.”
We’ll check back with the SSPP ahead of launch.
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Japanese startup ispace raises $46M to support planned moon missions
Japanese startup ispace has raised $46 million in a fresh round of Series C funding as it looks to complete three lunar lander missions in three years.
The funding will go toward the second and third of the planned missions, scheduled for 2023 and 2024. The first mission, which ispace aims to conduct in the latter half of 2022, is being furnished by earlier financing.
The Series C was led by Japanese VC firm Incubate Fund, with additional investment from partnerships managed by Innovation Engine, funds managed by SBI Investment Co., Katsunori Sago, Aizawa Investments and funds managed by HiJoJo Partners and Aizawa Asset Management. Incubate Fund’s investments in ispace stretch back to the company’s seed round in 2014.
Ispace’s total funding now stands at $195.5 million.
The company said last month it had started building the lunar landing flight module for the 2022 mission at a facility owned by space launch company ArianeGroup, in Lampoldshausen, Germany. The lander for that first mission, the Hakuto-R, will take three months to reach the moon, largely to save costs and additional weight from propellant. It will deliver a 22-pound rover for Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Rashid Space Center, a lunar robot for the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency and payload from three Canadian companies. The lander will reach the moon aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.
The 7.5 foot-tall Hakuto-R will also be used in the second mission in 2023, to deposit a small ispace rover that will collect data to support the company’s subsequent missions to the moon. For the final mission, the Toyko-based startup is developing a larger lander in the United States.
Ispace describes its long-term goal as being a “gateway for private sector companies to bring their business to the Moon.” The company has particular interest in helping spur a space-based economy, noting on its website that the moon’s water resources represent “untapped potential.”
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iRocket to begin rocket engine testing at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center
Reusable rocket startup iRocket has entered into a new partnership with NASA in its quest to reach commercialization in just two years.
The partnership will give iRocket access to testing facilities and engineering support, chiefly at the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. The company is hoping that it will conduct its first rocket engine test — an on-the-ground engine firing test — at the Huntsville site in September.
iRocket is earmarking $50 million over the next five years for the testing and development of its reusable engines and launch vehicle. Access to NASA facilities also means access to test stands — crucial infrastructure that provides controlled conditions for engine testing. iRocket will be able to conduct vacuum testing (which simulates space conditions) at the Glenn Research Center in Ohio and sea level testing at Marshall.
“We’re engaged in very intimate discussions, all the way at the center level, at Marshall Space Flight Center,” iRocket CEO Asad Malik said in a recent interview with TechCrunch.
The engines in question will eventually power iRocket’s inaugural Shockwave launch vehicles, fully reusable, autonomous small launchers capable of carrying payload with a maximum size of around 300 kg (661 lbs.) and 1,500 kg (around 3,300 lbs.). Manufactured via 3D printing, the engines will be powered by methane and liquid oxygen. “Methane is going to be the fuel of choice for deep space missions,” Malik said.
The New York-based startup is also aiming to make the engines hypersonic capable, an ambitious goal. But iRocket has ambitious plans. Malik wants to turn the company into the premier supplier for both reusable rocket engines and the rockets themselves. Because it’s designing both rocket stages to be reusable as well — a striking difference between it and other rocket developers — Malik said the company could one day not only launch satellites and cargo missions, but also clear space junk or retrieve experiments for biotech companies.
Malik pointed out that the sale of Aerojet Rocketdyne to Lockheed Martin — which is still under review by the Federal Trade Commission — is going to leave a gap in the market. “That’s going to open up the U.S. without an independent rocket supplier at a time when Congress is really pushing hard for us to move away from foreign-bought parts,” he said. “So it’s an opportunity for us to work with the government, the Pentagon, NASA and other partners to develop this next-generation space propulsion capability that we need.”
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