Houston’s growing commercial space economy is seeing representation in startup accelerators, as Amazon Web Services chose a Bayou City satellite company for its latest tech program.
Little Place Labs, a startup focusing on getting improved data analytics from satellites, is one of 14 companies participating in the 2023 AWS Space Accelerator. The only other Texas company in the cohort is Nominal of Austin.
Little Place Labs was co-founded in 2020 by Bosco Lai, Gaurav Bajaj and Liubov Sergeeva, who serve as CEO, CTO and COO, respectively. All three attended the University of Oxford, where the startup originated, according to the company's website.
The company’s goals are to improve the speed at which data is processed from satellites through the use of machine learning. The ideal software would allow insights from satellites to be captured and analyzed in real-time for applications ranging from surveillance to disaster detection.
In a statement to the Houston Business Journal, Lai said joining the accelerator would help the company expand its current team and continue development of its current software.
"In the next 12 to 18 months, our focus is to continue our focus on growing our team and building solutions that would help address the most impactful challenges out there in relation to global sustainability and national security — with use cases such as rapid detection of illegal fishing activities, monitoring and management of natural disasters like wildfires, and enhancing space operations through in-orbit fault-detection and diagnosis for longer lifespans of space assets," Lai said. "We are committed to driving sustainable and responsible use of space and Earth resources."
Satellite data is a growing subsector of the commercial space economy, with Straits Research projecting the market will grow to $27.07 billion by 2030 from its 2021 size of $6.55 billion. At a March 2023 forum, Don Graves, deputy secretary of the U.S. Department of Commerce, said the country’s Missile Technology Control Review program — which previously limited federal assistance in supporting foreign space vehicles — had been reviewed to provide more flexibility on exporting satellite parts and satellites.
“For those of you who have been denied satellite exports to certain [Missile Technology Control Regime] countries due to the choice of launch vehicle, this change of interpretation will have major business implications,” Graves said.
According to the AWS announcement, over half of the companies in the cohort have been funded at a seed level, and all have been funded at a pre-seed level, including Little Place Labs. All but two of the companies in the cohort hail from the United States, with the exceptions coming from France and Austria.
The four-week program will begin in May and will culminate in a July 19 demo day in San Francisco. The program set out to target space technology that also integrated use of cloud computing services such as those offered by AWS.
The participating companies will receive mentorship as well as the opportunity to use the AWS network to connect with potential clients.
The advances in Texas companies such as Axiom Space, SpaceX and Intuitive Machines (Nasdaq: LUNR) — which recently went public — led professional services firm PriceWaterCoopers to rank the Lone Star State first in the nation in aerospace investment in a recent report. On May 8, Axiom will launch its second commercial spaceflight mission, Axiom Mission 2, to travel to the International Space Station on board a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft.
Other recent Houston investments in space saw NASA develop a tech transfer center with a Midtown incubator, The Ion, to allow companies to license technology in 2022. The agency also awarded Axiom Space a $228.5 million contract to build suits for its Artemis III mission, and the company delivered in early 2023.
