Austin's space-related tech sector continues to shoot for the moon.
The latest big move in the market is a $5 million seed round closed by Austin-based Slingshot Aerospace. The round was led by ATX Venture Partners, and it included funding from a new investor -- Rise of the Rest Seed Fund, which was created by AOL co-founder Steve Case's venture firm Revolution.
While Slingshot isn't building rockets, it's helping facilitate space travel with its space situational awareness platform, Orbital Atlas, as well as geospatial visualization and an AI framework to assist drones and spacecraft. They feed satellite, drone and other data streams to an AI platform to develop insights for space travel. Among their customers and partners are NASA, BAE Systems and Boeing.
The company, founded in 2016, has raised a total of $9.1 million so far, which has included investment from Okapi Capital, Stage Venture Partners, Sway Ventures and Techstars Ventures. Slingshot is led by CEO David Godwin, a former CTO at Alert Media and LP in ATX Seed Ventures, as well as former Air Force officers Melanie Stricklan and Thomas Ashman.
It's based in Austin and in El Segundo, Calif.
“In bringing together disparate signals and using deep learning to speed up time-sensitive detections, both terrestrial and in orbit, we are continually discovering new ways to predict the unexpected and empower our commercial and defense customers with advanced analytics,” Stricklan said in a news release. “It’s extremely rewarding to know that we have started to fulfill our mission and attract the highest caliber talent who share this passion.”
The startup recently landed a $6 million two-year contract from the Air Force Space and Missile Systems Center.
“Slingshot is on the cutting edge of applying AI, ML and big data analytics to geospatial and orbital exploration at a time when insights are more needed than ever,” Colin Greenspon, partner at Revolution’s Rise of the Rest Seed Fund, said.
