Kapta Space, a Seattle-based developer of spaceborne radar payloads, said it has raised $24 million in Series A financing. The round was led by Washington Harbour Partners and co-led by Bison Ventures, with participation from MetaVC and a group of new and existing investors including MYDA Capital, Entrada Ventures, Aurelia Foundry and Fitz Gate Ventures. The company put its total funding at $30 million.
The funding will help it scale production of its technology to support several classified moving target indication contracts it secured earlier this year. Kapta was founded to address what it describes as a central challenge in space-based radar intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance: delivering the persistent coverage needed to detect and maintain custody of moving threats across air, sea and land. Conventional radar payloads have historically been too costly and complex to deploy across the large satellite constellations such missions require, the company said.
Kapta's modular Metamaterial Electronically Scanned Array, or MESA, architecture rethinks how electronically steerable radar payloads are built. The software-defined design is intended to deliver radar performance with significantly lower cost, power requirements and manufacturing complexity than traditional AESA approaches. The company said the architecture combines wide field-of-regard, rapid beam steering and scalable apertures so that spacecraft can search, track, revisit and maintain awareness of dynamic targets at mission scale.
Milton Perque, founder and chief executive of Kapta Space, said the mission calls for persistent awareness and that requires rethinking how radar has to work at constellation scale. He said traditional architectures are cost-prohibitive and were never designed for the scale these missions now demand, and that the investment allows the company to advance its technology, expand manufacturing and work with strategic partners to bring the capability through flight qualification and into contracted orbital missions.
Mina Faltas, founder and chief executive of Washington Harbour Partners, said traditional AESA payloads have been too costly and complex to deploy at the scale missions such as MTI require, and that the MESA architecture changes that with a modular, highly manufacturable approach. Ben Hemani, founding partner at Bison Ventures, said Kapta is rethinking a critical system from first principles by making space-based radar more scalable, cost-effective and manufacturable. Following the round, the company said it will focus on qualifying its payload for flight, expanding manufacturing capacity and preparing for its first orbital demonstration.
