Taking advanced billion-dollar U.S. government satellites and shrinking them down into multimillion-dollar satellites is how San Francisco startup Capella Space has attracted major VC funding and high profile government clients from Ukraine to the U.S.
This week the company raised $97 million in a Series C round led by NightDragon with participation from existing investors DCVC and Cota Capita.
The company currently operates seven satellites able to produce images around the globe that can see through clouds, smoke, fog and rain, operating 24-7, even at night. The satellite images have a refresh rate of three hours and use synthetic aperture radar (SAR) sensors that can form two-dimensional images of the ground below.
"Predominantly SAR has been a government capability that is extremely complex and costly," said Capella Space CEO and founder Payam Banazadeh. "We have taken that and miniaturized the tech to put it on small satellites that can be used for commercial purposes.
"One SAR government satellite is the size of a school bus and costs one billion dollars each, while ours is the size of a mini dorm fridge and costs in the single digit millions."
Banazadeh, a former engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, was driven to start the company after following news of the disappearance of Malaysian Airways Flight 370 in the Pacific Ocean in 2014.
"It kind of triggered me that we couldn't find something as large as a [Boeing] 777 on this planet," he said.
Capella was founded in 2016 and currently has 160 employees with an office in the Mission District. The company aims to use the funding to launch more satellites, grow its staff and develop new technologies and services.
The company counts the United States Air Force and National Reconnaissance office among its clients. Despite the U.S. government already having SAR satellites in space, it uses Capella's services at times because the startup's network of smaller cheaper satellites allows for more global coverage and faster images.
The company also has a number of unnamed private-sector clients, and is touting commercial use cases for its product, such as for insurance companies that want to monitor the the effects of natural disasters in real time.
Banazadeh says his company is working directly with the Ukrainian government to provide up-to-date satellite imagery, but wouldn't go into details of what specifically the images have been used for and how the technology has impacted the war effort.
"It is mostly cloudy in Ukraine this time of year, and the government there doesn't have the right satellites to monitor the situation," he said.
