Orbit Fab wants to construct “gas stations” for satellites – which suggests it needs a fuel cap, a mechanism used to transfer fuel from an orbital tanker to a customer’s spacecraft. This docking mechanism, called RAFTI, is currently approved for flight and commercially available. Price for every port? Only $30,000.
The Colorado-based startup (former TechCrunch Disrupt (*30*) finalist) has been operating since 2018, and its CEO and co-founder Daniel Faber has been working within the space industry for several a long time; he might be best known for running Deep Space Industries (DSI), a company that focused on asteroid mining. Founded in 2012, the corporate was acquired by Bradford Space seven years later.
“If you want to (talk) about something, it’s too early,” he joked during a recent interview. As a part of the corporate’s efforts to eventually construct the technology to seek for a distant asteroid, DSI built satellite thrusters for orbital maneuvering. This work and subsequent conversations with customers and colleagues ultimately led Faber to consider that the following big opportunity was space refueling.
Part of that’s simple arithmetic: Co-workers and former clients told him they may squeeze as much as $1 million in marginal revenue from satellite missions with an additional pound of fuel.
Image credits: TechCrunch/Orbit Fab on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt in 2019
“Spacecraft are optimized for how much fuel they have, and when they run out, that extra kilogram will give them a million dollars of marginal income,” Faber said. “We are creating so much value from this that we just have to do it.”
The 2010s also saw the emergence of several satellite servicing firms, comparable to Astroscale, that develop technologies for removing space debris, extending the lifetime of satellites, or delivering satellites on the last minute. Faber calls these capabilities “tow vehicle applications” and realized there would eventually be a need for orbital gas stations to complement this fleet.
This is how Orbit Fab was born. In the primary 12 months of the corporate’s operation raised a seed round worth $6 million with the support of Bolt and Munich Re Ventures, a VC company of Munich Re Group, considered one of the most important insurers of satellites and rockets. In 2023, the corporate raised a $28.5 million Series A round.
The startup’s technology is ambitious, however the architecture is kind of easy: the thought is to equip customer satellites with a refueling port (Faber called it a “fuel cap,” but officially it’s called RAFTI) while the hardware continues to be on Earth. RAFTI, which stands for “Rapid Attachment Fluid Transfer Interface,” will also be used to refuel the spacecraft on the bottom before launch. When a RAFTI-equipped satellite runs out of fuel, considered one of Orbit Fab’s tankers will have the ability to pick up some fuel from orbital depots and deliver it directly to the shopper’s satellite for refueling.
The only two things the corporate sells are fuel and refueling ports; as you would possibly expect, the true money will come from fuel sales. On its website, Orbit Fab says the service to deliver hydrazine to geostationary orbit will cost $20 million for a mass of up to 100 kilograms.
Given the simplicity of the architecture, nailing down each bit of hardware is crucial; subsequently, it took Orbit Fab years to debut on the refueling port. There are many variables to consider: cost to the shopper versus potential marginal revenue from a further life in orbit; the impact of refueling on the shopper’s spacecraft; and the challenge of developing a docking mechanism that may also transport fuel.
In addition to all of those challenges, the corporate had to be certain that its component complied with NASA, Space Force and American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics standards to ensure it was secure, reliable and resistant to the tough environments of space.
“It wasn’t cheap,” Faber said. “It wasn’t quick, but in the end we have an elegant design that meets these requirements and has the simplicity that comes from good design.”
Faber said considered one of the most important changes from the corporate’s founding to now’s the creation of the U.S. Space Force and the big impact it has had on the space industry. Ultimately, Orbit Fab focused most of its attention on meeting the emerging needs of the Space Force, which was very fascinated with orbital mobility to avoid space debris or rendezvous with other satellites.
The company anticipates that the primary RAFTI will launch customer satellites into orbit later this 12 months. That shall be followed next 12 months by the launch of the primary fuel shuttle under a contract with the Department of Defense to deliver fuel to geostationary orbit in 2025. Orbit Fab intends to sell 100 refueling ports this 12 months, which is able to enable RAFTI to have “a decent percentage of the satellites that will go into orbit,” he said Faber. He added that Orbit Fab has a further contract with an unnamed business customer to supply “a significant amount of fuel” over several years.
Beyond these milestones, Faber hinted that the corporate already had plans to modernize RAFTI and design variants that might handle higher pressure propellants. The team can be serious about redesigning the gripper housing for larger spacecraft if the market indicates that is where they need to go next.
“SpaceX made rockets reusable, Orbit Fab makes satellites reusable,” Faber said. “If you run a rocket company in today’s world and you’re not working on reusable rockets, you’re working in a dead end. The same goes for satellites: if you don’t make your satellites reusable, you’ll just put pre-planned junk into orbit.”
Blockchain startups were Things got hot when Katie Haun left Andreessen Horowitz in 2021 to start her own cryptocurrency-focused enterprise capital firm. However, shortly after Haun announced that the two Haun Ventures funds had reached a combined amount of $1.5 billion, cryptocurrency prices plummeted and FTX collapsed.
Despite having a large arsenal of dry powder, Haun Ventures has been slow to get into crypto and web3 on the low-cost, with many observers wondering when the company will pick up its pace of adoption.
While Haun Ventures says it wasn’t exactly sitting on its hands (and capital) during the cryptocurrency market downturn, the company was perhaps more cautious than it initially intended.
But now that bitcoin prices have rebounded to previous highs, Haun Ventures’ investment activity is increasing dramatically. Including some token items, the company has made 48 investments in accelerator funds value $500 million in early-stage and $1 billion in later-stage funding, Haun Ventures told TechCrunch.
The company’s latest investment is Agora – an application that improves voting and other decision-making processes in decentralized autonomous organizations. On Tuesday, the company led a $5 million seed round to Agora, with participation from Seed Club, Coinbase Ventures, Balaji Srinivasan and others.
Sam Rosenblum, partner at Haun Ventures, said a big barrier to DAO participation was the lack of an easy user interface that may allow members to approve (or vote on) the implementation of software updates to the protocols they manage.
The process was very fragmented. Some decisions were made on a separate Discord channel; “Then (the community) would go somewhere else to vote on whether to allocate treasury dollars to a specific project,” Rosenblum said.
Agora solves this problem for DAO members by providing an easy-to-use community and protocol management solution. “Historically, if you wanted to participate in the allocation of protocol vault resources, you had to perform a number of on-chain activities yourself, which likely meant you had a hardware and software configuration that most people didn’t have,” Rosenblum said.
Agora goals to make it easier for non-technical users to take part in DAO. Rosenblum compared it to Coinbase, which made coin trading simpler for most individuals.
The company was founded in 2022 by Charlie Feng, who co-founded fintech Clearco; Coinbase product designer Yitong Zhang; and software engineer Kent Fenwick.
Agora, which is actually a SaaS offering, is already utilized by protocols reminiscent of Optimisma href=”https://agora.ensdao.org/” goal=”_blank” rel=”noopener”>ENS and Uniswap.
Rosenblum explained that these protocols are pleased to pay Agora since it helps lower the barrier to participation of their community.
While activity in the cryptocurrency world is actually accelerating, Rosenblum didn’t say exactly when Haun Ventures will finish rolling out its current fund. However, he said that investments will proceed next 12 months.
When Keith Rabois announced in January that he was leaving Founders Fund and returning to Khosla Ventures, it got here as a shock to many within the venture capital ecosystem – and never simply because Rabois is a giant name within the industry.
This was surprising because, unlike in lots of other fields, venture capitalists traditionally don’t move fairly often – especially those that rise to the extent of partner or general partner, as was the case with Rabois.
VC funds have a 10-year lifecycle, and partners have a great reason to stay that course. In some cases, they could be “key people” in an organization’s fund, which suggests that in the event that they leave, the fund’s LP investors have the appropriate to withdraw their capital in the event that they so select. Many partners and GPs also invest a few of their very own money of their firm’s funds, giving them another excuse to stick with the firm.
So while it isn’t common for high-profile investors to move into the venture capital space, it seems to have happened in recent months. So far this 12 months, there have been significant cases of investors returning to old corporations, withdrawing from investments on their very own or stopping investing altogether.
Just TodayVic Singh, one in all the co-founders of Eniac Ventures, announced he was leaving the corporate he helped present in 2009 to start his own.
Singh joins a growing list of VCs who’ve recently left corporations.
Startups don’t avoiding large projects. Here’s my takeaway from the news that The Browser Company’s Arc Browser is now generally available to Windows users, just as Island has raised massive capital for its enterprise browser tool. It’s very encouraging to see startups embracing the core elements of technology, not only the apps available on platforms.
Of course, Chrom still reigns supreme, but it surely may take a while to do away with this horse.
Elsewhere in Startup Land on Equity this week, we delved into Chowdeck’s $2.5 million round. This is a Nigerian company that is reporting impressive growth in the sphere of food delivery in a very difficult market. Keep a watch on this as Nigeria is a big market and no single company has a closed delivery operation there. At least though.
We also took a glance New $150M Corelight Fundraisewhich is excellent news to chew on given its valuation and revenue growth.
On the venture front, we covered two stories: First, Intuition’s commitment to the buyer market is particularly interesting. The Paris-based fund is betting that the most effective approach to make as much money as possible is to go against the B2B SaaS narrative. Second, we see the creation of a new venture capital supergroup: Axios informs that investors with experience at a16z, Bessemer and Index are constructing a new company.
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