The world of corporate space has exhausted Bianca Cephalo and found it easy to literally launch your own space company and launch objects into orbit.
Cephalo is the founder of Space Dots, which was launched in 2022 to detect space threats. She and her team create a software platform called Sky-I for space technology manufacturers and operators, detecting, interpreting and attributes natural and human-driven threats in orbit.
She has spent decades in the industry, working on projects that put things on the moon and put satellites into orbit. She works as a Thermofluid Dynamic Analyst on the NASA Insights Mission to Mars, is a product manager for Airbus Defense and Space, and is working on communications satellites.
However, she discovered that industry politics and corporate bureaucracy are bottlenecks for advancement. “I’m getting bored of games,” she told TechCrunch.
She recalled how she met resistance every time she pitched her ideas to her last employer. “The response was the same. ‘If we haven’t flew yet, we’re not using it on our satellite,” she recalled. “We were told to innovate, but they refused to adopt something that has not been proven… I was hired to become an “innovator” among the corporate giants, but in reality they were told “not too many.” ”
And in it, she rewrites the rules.
Cephalo said almost 15% of spacecraft have experienced some kind of abnormality or failure due to their manufacturers and operations.
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“Ground simulations can only be modelled that much. The actual environment is more complicated and all trajectory regimes are different,” she said.
For example, what could work in low orbits does not necessarily work in deep space. Radiation alone can cause various disasters that lead to spacecraft failures, but other accidents in space are dismissed as malfunctions or “space weather.”
“Spacedots generate their own intraordinate environmental data, blending it with external sources and real-time belongings, and now they blend with casting, predictions, creating room for competition for the spacecraft and giving the edge of intelligence to succeed,” she said.
Space Dot is already capturing data from payloads (the object of Space) and plans to get more from future releases. The company announced a $1.5 million seed round, led by the Women Founders Fund on Monday. Currently, the total funding is raised total of $3.2 million.
Cephalo described the fundraising process as “dating and marrying,” or brutal. She met lead investors in the female founders fund simply by using the company’s online cold outreach form. She also asked Sie Ventures investors if they could give a warm introduction to the FFF team.
“After all, both paths converged. Our application was taken up through the form and SIE was able to connect me directly with Anu. The combination worked,” says Cefalo.
Other investors in the round include touch ventures and General Electric Company.
As Cephalo said, the space industry is experiencing a second revolution. In particular, billionaires are pouring millions of dollars into commercializing space travel. Competitors include names such as Ensemble Space Lab and Mission Space.
Cephalo said her company is different because Spacedot owns both hardware and software. It focuses not just on prediction, but on commerce, defense and threat attribution. Its software is also decentralized, which states that it is “more resilient and scalable due to future Cislunar and Multi-Orbit operations.”
“We don’t see space weather players as zero-sum competitors. This is an area where collaboration strengthens the entire ecosystem. Our intelligence can be connected to other services and amplified, and vice versa,” she continued.
Cephalo said he will use seed rounds to expand his London and US teams and prepare technology for future space missions. For her, the future is for her to mean access to space not gated power but shared knowledge.
“The more you understand what’s going on there, the more you can protect what’s important here: national infrastructure, civil safety, voyage, defense,” she said.
“That knowledge does not remain trapped within agents or businesses. It must be shared with understanding, radical access, and planetary attribution.”
This work has been updated to Clairfy about what Spacedot does.
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