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Starfish Spacehas closed a unexampled tranche of funding lead by a major defense tech investor as it take care to establish three full - size of it satellite servicing and review space vehicle in 2026 .

The Washington - based inauguration ’s Otter ballistic capsule is design for two chief missions : extending the usable liveliness of expensive planet in geostationary orbit ( GEO ) and disposing of defunct satellites in humble Earth arena ( LEO ) . It ’s a series of capabilities that have never been available for artificial satellite manipulator , who launch their satellites with the arithmetic mean that they ’ll only have a limited span of useful life .

The aim , as Starfish chief operating officer and cobalt - founder Austin Link put it in a late interview , is to “ make it affordable enough that the benefit of having your satellite serviced outweigh the costs . ”

The $ 29 million round of golf was led by Shield Capital , a venture house centre on funding technologies that will sham U.S. national security . It has enter in just a handful of other deals in the space diligence . The round also include involvement from new investors Point72 Ventures , Booz Allen Ventures , Aero X Ventures , Trousdale Ventures , TRAC VC , and existing investors Munich Re Ventures , Toyota Ventures , NFX , and Industrious Ventures .

“ You commence a company because you want to build satellites , not because you need to fund-raise , ” Link told TechCrunch . Link founded Starfish in 2019 with Trevor Bennett after the twosome work as flight sciences engineers at Blue Origin . They raised$7 million in 2021and$14 million two eld later on . Starfish set up its first presentment delegacy , a sub - scale spacecraft befittingly called Otter Pup , last summer .

Although that missiondid not quite go concord to plan , Starfish has racked up several wins since then , admit three separate contract for full - size of it Otter ballistic capsule . That includes a $ 37.5 million deal with the U.S. Space Force for a first - of - its - kind docking and maneuvering missionary work with a denial satellite in GEO and a contract with major satellite communications companyIntelsat for life annex services . The third contract , a $ 15 million NASA mission to inspect multiple defunct satellite in LEO , was announced while Starfish was in the middle of fundraising , Link said .

Starfish purposefully coiffe out to find investors that had experience helping their portfolio companies sail sell to the governing , Link said . “ The politics is a customer that it sometimes can be backbreaking to scale with , so make investor that understood the process a little well … we thought they ’d be salutary additions to our cap table . ”

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Link impart that the company is envision a “ fair even split ” in need between government and commercial-grade customers .

planet servicing , life extension , and satellite disposal are “ exciting first stairs , ” Link said , but they ’re mistreat stone on the way to developing a broader suite of capability for even more ambitious missions on orbit .

“ Along the way , we end up with this set of self-reliance and robotics technology and capabilities and datasets that leave us to go finally do broadly a circle of complex robotic or servicing or ISAM - character missions in space that maybe stretch a small beyond what we do with the Otter , ” he allege . “ I think a lot of those are a long elbow room off , and not needfully where our focus is right now … but some of the effort that goes into the Otter today and is fund through this support bout , and some of the growth there leads to a foresightful term where Starfish Space can have a broad impact on the way that humans go out into the universe . ”