An Austin- and California-based startup that is just coming off two significant acquisitions has raised fresh venture funding to help it monitor the ever increasing amount of cosmic traffic orbiting Earth.
Slingshot Aerospace Inc. said Dec. 6 it has raised roughly $40.9 million in a series A2 round.
San Francisco-based firm Sway Ventures led the investment. Others throwing in money included C16 Ventures, ATX Venture Partners, Lockheed Martin Ventures, Valor Equity Partners and Draper Associates. Slingshot said it also secured an undisclosed venture loan from Horizon Technology Finance.
The new money will be used, in part, to help finance Slingshot's recent acquisitions of Numerica’s Space Domain Awareness division and satellite database company Seradata. Those deals added about 30 employees to the Slingshot team, including space industry researchers, orbital analysts, software engineers, applied mathematicians and technology development engineers.
Slingshot, founded in 2017, has offices in Austin and El Segundo, Calif., as well as Colorado Springs and Fort Collins, Colorado. The startup, which was one of Austin Inno's Fire Award winners this year, is led by founder and CEO Melanie Stricklan, a retired Air Force officer, as well as co-founder and Chairman David Godwin and co-founder and Director of Product Thomas Ashman.
It makes software used to track objects in space and avoid collisions and also to train for trips to space, among other products.
The company currently employs more than 150 people, including more than 20 in its Austin office. The company recently moved into a new space in the Austin Centre, which is also home to startup accelerator Capital Factory.
Slingshot, which earlier this year raised a $25 million series A1 round co-led by Draper Associates and ATX Venture Partners, said it has now raised $82.85 million since its inception.
"Our successful funding round during a global economic downturn is validation that investors understand the urgent need for safe and sustainable spaceflight operations as activity in orbit outpaces current space traffic management constructs," Stricklan stated. “Our mission is to ensure that our customers overcome those vulnerabilities and optimize their critical operations in orbit. We have an unprecedented opportunity in this next phase of growth as we continue to be a driving force to de-risk operations in the space revolution.”
