Space DOTS raises $1.5m seed funding to speed-up a platform to help satellite builders and operators find the true reasons fot anomalies in orbit. The London-headquartered and U.S.-founded startup, founded by aerospace industrial veteran Bianca Cefalo, is in the process of building what it has named SKY-I—software that merges in-orbit sensor data with third party intelligence to attribute natural and man-made threats across multiple orbital regimes.
Female Founders Fund led the round, with participation from Feel Ventures and from the General Electric Co. Space DOTS has raised a combined total of $3.2 million.
The company says it will use the new capital to grow its engineering and data science teams as well as launch more space-based payloads to feed the SKY-I engine.
Why tracking threats in space depends on attribution
It has never been harder to keep spacecraft alive. The United States Space Surveillance Network monitors tens of thousands of objects in orbit, while the European Space Agency has estimated that there are over 36,000 pieces of debris that are 10 centimeters or larger, around a million objects between 1 and 10 centimeters and well over a hundred million smaller particles. Particles on the scale of millimeters can even puncture thermal blankets or ding sensors, creating compound risks hard to suss out from afar.
Environmental hazards are just part of it. Space weather can warm the upper atmosphere and boost drag, disturb radio connections and erode electronics. A much-cited example: a moderate geomagnetic storm led dozens of internet satellites launched that week to fail reentry attempts and burn up, driving home how fast things can change. The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center posts advisories about such solar storms, which can drive the Kp index higher, but turning these advisories into spacecraft-specific warnings remains a challenge for many operators.
Then there are the human-made dangers—radio frequency interference, spoofing, directed energy, and debris-generating events—which often pass themselves off as “random glitches.” Cefalo says that a significant number of on-orbit anomalies are a result of environmental and operational factors misinterpreted or misapplied, a sentiment shared by post mission reviews conducted industry wide. Without a guided path to how those blocks will be used, operators build to over-engineer hardware, underwrite bad assumptions or get blindsided.
Inside the SKY-I approach
Space DOTS is developing a data fabric that will seamlessly combine Para a) proprietary in-orbit measurements including radiation dose, particle flux, thermal, structure response, magnetic field variations, and RF environment snapshots, with those from external sources including: conjunction data, solar wind parameters, geomagnetic indices, and ground radar assessments. The goal is to produce real-time “nowcasts” of local risk, “explain what caused the anomaly, and forecast near-term exposure for the next orbit or the next day.”
Instead of sending all data to one ground-based node, the company is building a distributed software architecture. This processing is distributed (across spacecraft, hosted payloads, and clusters of ground processing capability) to minimize latency, and support resilience in the face of degraded links, a valuable attribute for mission to cislunar space or contested environments. For manufacturers, this means being able to validate designs against real orbital conditions; for operators, it means alerts they can act on and accomplish something with, and for all, it means no uncertainty as to whether an event was meaningful to a particular mission.
Space DOTS says it already has data coming in from an on-orbit payload, and is planning multiple follow-on deployments to expand coverage over low Earth orbit as well as other regimes. The company’s product road map includes feature extraction for faster root-cause analysis and shared taxonomies that allow operators to consistently label events across fleets.
A crowded market, with a clear focus
The space safety and intelligence market is growing at an at a very high rate. Companies like LeoLabs offer precision tracking and conjunction warnings; Slingshot Aerospace and others offer space domain awareness; players such as Mission Space and Ensemble Space Labs work on tracking space weather and sensing the environment there. Space DOTS sits at the intersection of these fields, emphasizing threat attribution: not merely flagging that “something happened,” but explaining what and why to a specific vehicle.
Cefalo argues that the company’s special sauce is owning both the sensing layer and the analytics stack, which allows for faster loops between raw measurements and operator guidance. Instead of competing with other providers, Space DOTS characterizes its tools as complementary — data and models that can plug into larger traffic management, insurance underwriting and mission assurance workflows for commercial and government customers.
Founder backgrounds and first customers
Cefalo has a thermofluid analysis background from a NASA Mars project and product management from a top European satellite prime including significant large telecom bleacher experience. That blend of deep engineering experience and operational exposure is embodied in SKY-I’s focus on subsystem-level signatures—what radiation looks like in memory errors, what charging looks like in attitude control behavior, what drag spikes look like in orbit determination residuals.
While the company has not shared any specific contracts, the target buyers are obvious: satellite manufacturers looking to harden designs based on real environment data, operators who have a constellation to manage to the minute and defense users who want to separate space weather from hostile interference. Insurers are a similarly natural audience, since attribution can bolster actuarial models and claims processing.
Use of funding and next steps
The new capital will also support hiring in radiation effects, RF analytics and data engineering and additional payload integrations to further expand geographic and orbital diversity. Space DOTS also intends to increase presence in London and throughout the US, to correspond to its customers and launch opportunities.
If it succeeds, SKY-I could help move the chewed-up excuse of “space weather” as a reason for a failed launch to evidence-based industry practices — from observing scattered signals to inferring cause-and-effect. In a field where one unexplained reset can reverberate into failed missions or expensive redesigns, attribution is not a luxury; it’s the difference between guessing and governing.
