Houston-based startup Little Place Labs was the only Houston-based company named to the latest cohort of the Los Angeles-based Techstars Space Accelerator.
The program will run until December, and the 12 companies selected in the cohort will go through sessions focusing on fundraising and customer discovery.
“Techstars is one of the most well-known programs, especially for early-stage startups like us,” Little Place Labs CEO Bosco Lai told Houston Inno in an interview. “We’re ready to take our basic foundation and grow from there.”
The company reached out to Techstars leadership around the time of its founding in 2020, Lai said. While it was too soon for Little Place Labs to be selected for a cohort then, a connection between Lai and Techstars Los Angeles entrepreneur Sherman Williams in 2022 helped the Houston company become a more attractive startup for the Space Accelerator.
One of Little Place Labs' other milestones Lai highlighted was the company’s acceptance to the 2023 Amazon Web Services Space Accelerator in April. Little Place Labs was chosen due to its focus on space technology that integrated cloud computing.
The company’s stated goals are to improve the speed at which data is processed from satellites using 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.
The next goals for Little Place Labs are to complete a funding round to allow the company to expand its team and to continue securing contracts, Lai said. He confirmed Little Place Labs had already secured at least one contract from the U.S. Air Force and was working with the Department of Defense for future opportunities.
“We are aiming at having multiple of these contracts or pilots in place so that we have dual-use revenue coming in,” Lai said.
On the technology side, Little Place Labs completed its first in-space satellite demonstration in late 2022 through a partnership with Italy-based aerospace company D-Orbit. Lai said the company plans to make a more complex demonstration in the next six months.
“We want to be known as a leader in this space in a year’s time,” Lai said. “When people think about data processing solutions in space and in orbit, we want them to think about Little Place Labs.”
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.
The growth of private space companies in Texas led professional services firm PricewaterhouseCoopers to rank the Lone Star State first in the nation in aerospace in a 2023 report. One of the companies highlighted in the report, Houston-based Axiom Space, completed a $350 million Series C raise in August, making it second only to California-based SpaceX in total capital raised by private space companies.
The Houston area is also seeing infrastructure investment to support the development of space technology and new companies. In August, the board of directors at the Texas A&M University System approved the creation of the Texas A&M Space Institute and a new $200 million facility near NASA's Johnson Space Center. Not far away, the Houston Spaceport at Ellington Airport has started welcoming tenants.
