SAN FRANCISCO – Star Catcher Industries, a startup focused on beaming solar energy to spacecraft in low-Earth orbit, raised $12.25 million in a seed round announced July 24.
Former Made In Space CEO Andrew Rush teamed up earlier this year with Michael Snyder, Made In Space co-founder and former chief engineer, and space investor Bryan Lyandvert to establish Star Catcher. The company is based in Jacksonville, Florida.
“For the first time, technologically and from a business perspective a space-to-space power grid makes sense,” Rush told SpaceNews. “We have a good handle on the technology. And for the first time, there is a geographic concentration of customers in low-Earth orbit that all have a common need. They want more power.”
Star Catcher plans to deliver broad solar spectrum energy on demand to each client spacecraft’s solar arrays. The Star Catcher space-based energy grid is designed to provide spacecraft with five-to-10 times the amount of power they generate on their own.
In-Orbit Demonstration
Initialized Capital and B Capital co-led Star Catcher’s seed round. Rogue VC also participated in a “meaningful” way, according to the news release.
With the funding, Star Catcher intends to roughly double its 11-person staff. In addition, the company plans to perform ground and space-based demonstrations of its technology.
An initial ground-based demonstration will “show the end-to-end system functioning,” Rush said. In December 2025, Star Catcher plans to demonstrate a sub-scale version of its power nodes in orbit.
“We’ll get flight heritage on collecting, conditioning and redirecting solar spectrum to power a client’s satellite,” Rush said.
Potential Applications
Spacecraft are becoming increasingly power hungry.
“Being able to buy power for your spacecraft whenever and wherever you need it in LEO will expand opportunity and accelerate humanity realizing the potential of the second golden age of space,” Rush said in a statement.
Potential applications for Star Catcher’s solar energy delivery service include synthetic aperture radar satellites and direct-to-device communications constellations.
In addition, satellite operators often want power for edge processing of imagery and data. “They want to take modern GPUs and put them in spacecraft,” Rush said. “This is a big unlock for that sort of data processing in space.”
Initialized Capital principal Andrew Sather said in a statement, “Most any maturing sector requires solid, dependable, ubiquitous infrastructure to really take off. We’re confident Star Catcher will do for orbital power what SpaceX has done for launch.”
Howard Morgan, B Capital chair and general partner, said in a statement, “Satellite launch costs continue to fall, and power needs are accelerating with onboard processing. At the same time, energy demand is vastly outstripping the supply that current solar panels and batteries provide. Star Catcher’s founders are drawing from their extensive industry experience to tackle this opportunity with a unique approach.”
