WASHINGTON — Starfish Space has raised more than $100 million to scale up production of its satellite servicing spacecraft.
Seattle-based Starfish announced April 7 it closed a Series B round led by Point72 Ventures, raising more than $100 million. Activate Capital and Shield Capital co-led the round, with major participation from Industrious Ventures and NightDragon. Several other new and existing investors were also part of the funding round.
“From our perspective, Starfish has made steady progress toward practical on-orbit servicing,” said Chris Morales, partner at Point72 Ventures, in a statement. “We believe their early traction with defense and commercial customers and successful autonomous missions show these capabilities are becoming increasingly relevant to space operations and national security.”
The company, which raised $29 million in November 2024, says the funding will enable it to scale up production of its Otter line of spacecraft designed for in-space servicing of other spacecraft. The company has won several contracts from government and commercial customers for missions to extend the lives of satellites or deorbit defunct satellites.
“This is the money for us to go and fly several Otters with and to scale up to have more Otters that provide services,” Austin Link, co-founder of Starfish, said in an interview.
The funding will help Starfish hire additional staff. Link said the company currently has about 90 employees and is seeking to bring on 40 to 50 more people in the next year. This will support production of new Otter spacecraft as well as spacecraft operations and mission management.
Starfish has several Otter spacecraft in production, with the first to launch later this year. The company hasn’t disclosed who will be the customer for the first mission, but Link said the company’s first two contracts were with satellite operator SES for a geostationary orbit life extension mission and the U.S. Space Force for another GEO mission under a Strategic Funding Increase, or STRATFI, agreement.
“We have been building those Otters for a while, and so they are at the beginning of the line for launch,” he said.
Starfish is seeing a wide range of interest, with government and commercial customers for missions in both GEO and low Earth orbit. “To have a real balance there is a gift for us,” he said. “Because the Otter really is dual use, it means that we can learn from the missions that we do in one area and take those learnings to make missions in another area better.”
As Starfish prepares its first Otters for launch, the company is still flying a test mission, Otter Pup 2, intended to test rendezvous and docking technologies. The company announced last month it found a new partner for the docking demonstration after the original partner backed out.
Link said that Otter Pup 2, launched last June, is working well in orbit. “It’s just a matter now of we’ve got to get to the new docking partner and we’ve got to go in and dock with them, but we’re really excited about how the satellite itself has been working,” he said.
Even with the delays in that docking test, Starfish expects the lessons of that mission can still feed into the first Otter spacecraft. “For us, it comes down to so much of what we do is dominated by the software side,” he said. Any lessons learned from Otter Pup 2 can be incorporated into software updates uplinked to Otter spacecraft even after launch.
Part of the funding round will help Starfish plan for future technologies and applications for Otter. “We’re trying to help folks get the most out of the infrastructure that we put in space,” Link said. That starts with life extension and disposal services, but he suggested that could expand over time to include assembling and repairing spacecraft in space.
“What has me really excited about this fundraise is we get to go fly Otters and provide services with them that help people and really, for the first time, introduce commercial satellite servicing in a way that has never been done at any scale before,” he said.