10 Smallsat Startups to Watch in 2024

Rising interest rates have made for a tough fundraising environment for space startups in the past year and a half. This environment has put the value of business cases in critical focus for investors. Yet, creative startups with strong business cases are still attracting attention. From April to June of this year, space startups received $2.41 billion in financing from global investors — the third consecutive quarter of growth in funding, according to a recent analysis from Seraphim Space.

In this feature, Via Satellite highlights 10 Smallsat Startups to Watch for the third year in a row. It’s a group of startups on the rise in the smallsat arena in early funding rounds or pre-funding. This list represents companies from around the world that have piqued investors’ interest, honed in on a niche market, or advanced to technology milestones. This year’s list features companies from Australia to South Korea, Finland, and beyond.

AIRMO

Airmo is one of a number of exciting startups that looks to use space tech to benefit the climate. The climate tech startup, based in Germany, aims to provide continuous and precise data on greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) from space. Airmo aims to reshape our understanding of GHG emissions and enable the development of more targeted, effective climate solutions. Led by Founder and CEO Daria Stepanova, the company has a goal of becoming the standard in carbon emissions reporting. Founded in 2022, Airmo raised 5.2 million euros ($5.7 million) in pre-seed financing last year. The company has been developing a payload to collect GHG measurements from a small satellite platform in space.

Airmo’s target customers are oil and gas companies and it could be well-placed to help companies across different sectors move to a data-based decision making model. Other use cases for its technology involve supply chain monitoring, agriculture, and financial companies and VC companies looking at the carbon emissions of their portfolio companies. It is one to watch in this burgeoning area of climate and space.

ASTROGATE LABS

India’s space startup industry has been on a rapid rise in the past few years after Prime Minister Narendra Modi opened the door to commercial space opportunities in 2020. Since then, a number of startups have raised eye-catching funding rounds and logged impressive technology achievements. Astrogate Labs, based in Bengaluru, is working to make an impact in India’s nascent commercial space industry by designing a laser communication system for small satellites. The company says its Astro-Link laser terminal designed for cubesats and nanosats can support up to 1 Gbps downlink.

Astrogate Labs secured an important vote of confidence with an investment from EO firm SatSure, which announced plans to use Astro-Link on its satellites in 2023. Astrogate has been hard at work raising its profile on the global scene, participating in startup programs in Taiwan and Seraphim Space’s 12th startup accelerator. The company’s laser terminal was recently one of the winners in Indian Defence Research & Development Organisation’s (DRDO) ‘Dare to Dream’ innovation contest. With the number of smallsat startups in India on the rise, there is both a global market and a national market for Astrogate’s laser technology.

DARK

Dark is a French space security and protection company that hopes to offer a new layer of security in orbit to space companies. The company developed Interceptor, a system that provides access to any point in Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) in less than 24 hours to remove dangerous objects and prevent the spread of space debris. Dark has already secured contracts worth several million dollars with the French government and CNES, the French Space Agency. Late last year, CNES awarded Dark a contract to conduct what it claims was the world’s first private emergency interception simulation. The study will assess Dark’s Interceptor system. These contracts are directed toward future initiatives, including emergency debris removal services utilizing its Interceptor platform and new propulsion advancements.

One of Dark’s investors is U.S.-based firm Long Journey. Arielle Zuckerberg, general partner at Long Journey, called the company “magically weird” and said Dark is on a path to be a global category-defining company that will solve an existential problem for the space industry. That’s a bold statement to live up to. Dark is gearing up for an orbital defense demonstration by 2026. Dark will leverage new in-house technologies, including advanced radar capabilities for space detection and orbital propulsion optimized for maneuvering large objects and controlled re-entry in the atmosphere.

DELOS INSURANCE SOLUTIONS

Space data is becoming more relevant to the insurance industry as natural disasters become more frequent and severe. Delos Insurance Solutions, based in California, aims to use algorithms to analyze satellite imagery and high-resolution weather forecasts to aid insurance companies providing insurance to homeowners and businesses. While Delos is an insurance company and acts as an underwriting managing general agent (MGA), space data is at the heart of its business.

Founders Kevin Stein and Shanna McIntyre worked together in the space industry. After studying aerospace engineering and physics at Stanford and Berkeley, they worked on engineering and risk management at multiple space companies, seeing up close what sorts of incredibly useful data satellites and spacecraft can provide. Delos now uses this data to predict wildfire risk.

Delos targets areas perceived as high wildfire risk to write homeowners insurance policies. Delos leverages satellite imagery to estimate fuel loads, fused with weather data and socioeconomic data to produce extremely accurate wildfire risk models they use to determine whether or not to write insurance policies. The company says it can reflect new behaviors with its models in less than a month and leverages novel AI techniques to analyze over 100 parameters to achieve this very high accuracy. Delos started in California but believes there could be around 3 million homes in the U.S. at risk from wildfires. The use of satellite imagery and analytics is starting to revolutionize the insurance market. Delos is one of the first companies to shake up this market and come up with new solutions where ‘old’ insurance models simply don’t work in this new reality. It once again showcases how satellite technology can solve solutions in other markets that previously seemed inaccessible to satellite.

FREEFALL AEROSPACE

Low-cost antenna solutions are key to expanding the reach of satellite connectivity. FreeFall Aerospace is working on this by pursuing unique antennas for small spacecraft and ground stations. The company’s technology is based on research that founders Doug Stetson and Dr. Chris Walker worked on at the University of Arizona for a NASA balloon astronomy telescope. Stetson and Walker found that these systems could benefit small spacecraft communications. Now spun out into its own company in Tucson, Arizona, FreeFall Aerospace is working on a number of antenna products.

Its products include: deployable spacecraft antennas for telecommunications and remote sensing onboard satellites; and a ground terminal for high-performance connectivity with non-Geostationary Orbit (NGSO) constellations. The company says its products offer efficient beam steering that can reduce satellites' mass, power, complexity, and costs in space, and lower the cost of connectivity from space to ground. Last year, the company named Dan Geraci as its new CEO and participated in Seraphim Space’s 12th startup accelerator. This startup is one to watch for if it can reach the next stage of growth and gain wider adoption for its antenna technologies.

K2 SPACE

While not technically a “smallsat” startup, K2 Space is taking a new approach to manufacturing satellites, much like how the smallsat revolution kicked off. Small satellites have been trending larger in size for years, and K2 is moving in that same direction by building a large satellite bus designed to offer the payload mass, power, and volume of today’s exquisite large satellites at the price point of small satellites.

The company is based in Los Angeles and was founded by brothers Neel and Karan Kunjur. Neel spent more than five years as an engineer at SpaceX, and Karan previously helped lead AI company Text IQ. K2 raised an impressive $50 million in funding earlier this year. It is backed by early SpaceX leader Bulent Altan’s venture capital firm Alpine Space Ventures, along with Altimeter Capital, First Round Capital, and Republic Capital. The company is moving quickly as it prepares to launch a demonstration mission this year. It also achieved the first hot fire of its electric propulsion thruster and logged $10.2 million in government contracts. K2 space is one to watch for its potential to disrupt the constellation manufacturing market.

NARA SPACE

Nara Space is one of the most talked about new entrants into South Korea’s commercial space market. The company, founded in 2015, provides comprehensive end-to-end services in nano and micro-satellites, from satellite design and manufacturing to mission operations and value-added imagery services. Late last year, the company launched its Observer-1A, 16U satellite, which was one of South Korea’s first commercial nanosatellites.

Nara Space has a recent partnership with Samsung Electronics that will see the two companies develop infrastructure to evaluate the reliability of memory semiconductors in space. This collaboration will involve loading Samsung's memory semiconductor evaluation tester into space aboard the Korean launch vehicle Nuri scheduled for 2025. Nara has also developed a satellite called BUSANSAT for Busan, South Korea’s second largest city. This satellite will collect marine spatial information and monitor marine fine dust, enhancing environmental monitoring and contributing to maritime safety and health. Nara Space is also working on the NarSha Project for South Korea’s first methane monitoring microsatelilte constellation, in collaboration with Seoul National University (SNU) and the Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute (KASI). Nara Space’s momentum and its business mix of small satellite manufacturing and EO data analytics services make it a space startup to watch in Asia.

QUASAR SATELLITE TECHNOLOGIES

Based in Sydney, Australia, Quasar Satellite Technologies is working to improve ground station access and radio frequency monitoring. The company offers a digital and multibeam phased array ground station system, technology developed by Australia’s national science agency CSIRO. Quasar says this ground station can support up to 100 satellite communications simultaneously with one antenna, and has the potential to replace fields of parabolic dishes. The phased array ground station can support multiple missions. It is capable of delivering both satellite communications downlink for operators, and space domain awareness (SDA), monitoring radio frequency (RF) communications in space.

The company was created in 2021 and raised $6 million in pre-Series A funding in 2023. Quasar is catching the attention of the Australian and U.S. military. The company was awarded a $5.3 million contract in 2023 through Australia’s Defence Innovation Hub to further develop its multibeam phased array ground station system. This year, the company participated in the Catalyst Accelerator to demonstrate space domain awareness technologies to the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory Space Vehicles Directorate. Notably, it was the only international organization to participate in the accelerator.

REORBIT

Finnish startup ReOrbit is investing in the software-defined future of space, challenging hardware-centric satellite design with a software-first mindset. The company is developing a bundle of flight software and avionics hardware called Muon to serve as an operating system that can be installed in any satellite. ReOrbit also builds small satellite platforms, and customers can either purchase Muon for their own platform, or the full satellite platform with all subsystems. The company was founded in Sweden in 2019 but moved its headquarters to Helsinki in Finland after CEO and founder Sethu Saveda Suvanam saw momentum in Finland’s space startup scene. Last year, the company raised an oversubscribed $7.4 million seed funding round.

ReOrbit has an impressive list of collaborators and supporters. The European Space Agency (ESA) is supporting ReOrbit’s upcoming UKKO satellite mission through the InCubed program. UKKO will demonstrate an end-to-end EO value chain between EO payloads and end users, as well as satellite-to-satellite and satellite-to-ground communication. ReOrbit recently selected Mynaric’s laser terminals to support the mission. The company is also working with Thales Alenia Space on ESA’s HydRON program and also has collaborations with SatixFy and AAC Clyde Space. ReOrbit has a vision of satellites as “flying routers” to enable the flow of real-time data in space.

SPACE DOTS

Space Dots aims to become a leader in in-orbit materials testing in space. Led by CEO Bianca Cefalo, the goal of the company is to simplify the process of space materials qualification and empower materials suppliers to confidently enter the space market. Its Barnacle DOT hosted payload will provide active in-orbit materials testing services. Barnacle DOT will utilize existing hosting platforms and employ the company’s proprietary testing labs technology supported by the company’s environmental sensing unit, known as the Data DOT. Cefalo recently spoke with Via Satellite about “untapped potential” in data services, which influenced the development of the Data DOT space environmental data-gathering unit. The first Data DOT will launch in October this year.

The company’s primary focus now is on space industry primes followed by in-space servicing, assembly and manufacturing (ISAM) and Cislunar missions. Over the next 12 months, the company hopes to secure its first commercial customer contracts, and start generating revenue. The company has plans in 2025 and 2026 that will include scheduled customer missions and preparations for a potential inaugural Moon mission. VS