Rendezvous Robotics raises funding to develop technology for self-assembling space structures

WASHINGTON — A startup has raised an initial round of funding to commercialize a technology that could create large structures in orbit.

Rendezvous Robotics announced Sept. 10 it raised $3 million in a pre-seed round led by Aurelia Foundry and 8090 Industries, with participation from several other funds and angel investors.

The company, based in Golden, Colorado, plans to commercialize a technology developed at the MIT Media Lab called Tessellated Electromagnetic Space Structures for the Exploration of Reconfigurable, Adaptive Environments, or TESSERAE. The technology involves tiles that can self-assemble and reconfigure themselves, creating large structures.

“It’s time to profoundly scale up our ambitions in orbit. We’re launching a new paradigm for in-space construction,” said Ariel Ekblaw, who invented the technology at MIT and is a co-founder of Rendezvous Robotics, in a statement.

The TESSERAE technology, developed at MIT and later supported by Ekblaw’s Aurelia Institute, has gone through several rounds of testing, including on parabolic aircraft flights that provide brief periods of microgravity and on a New Shepard suborbital flight. It has also been tested twice on the International Space Station.

“We’re on the fifth generation of that TESSERAE technology now,” said Joe Landon, co-founder and president of Rendezvous Robotics, in an interview. That latest version will go to the ISS in early 2026 for more tests, seeing how a set of 32 tiles, each the size of a dinner plate, can self-assemble into an enclosed structure within the station. That will be followed by a test of the technology in space.

Ekblaw envisioned using TESSERAE to assemble large space habitats. The company, which has the exclusive commercial rights to the technology, is exploring nearer-term applications as well.

“There are certain missions today and applications that require scale in space, missions where physical size drives performance, and that is large antenna apertures and large solar arrays for high-power communications and remote sensing missions,” Landon said. “That’s the first and most urgent application that we see.”

The company believes TESSERAE could be used to assemble sturdy structures more efficiently than traditional deployable technologies. “When you’re building a mechanical deployable, the bigger it is, it gets more expensive and takes more time, exponentially, because it gets more and more complex,” he said. “If you build out with our TESSERAE tiles, it scales linearly with size.”

Rendezvous Robotics envisions scaling up the size of TESSERAE tiles to the diameter of rocket payload fairings. That would maximize the usable volume of the fairings to launch tiles for various applications.

The company has found interest in the technology from both potential commercial and national security customers. “We need to prove that we can actually do this in a free-space environment and we can make it resilient,” said Phil Frank, a veteran technology executive and entrepreneur who is chief executive and co-founder of Rendezvous Robotics.

“We need to demonstrate it first. But we think the demand is really strong for this once it’s demonstrated,” added Landon, who has worked at companies ranging from Boeing and Lockheed Martin to startup Planetary Resources before co-founding Rendezvous Robotics.

The pre-seed funding will help the company carry out those demonstrations. “This has given us enough bandwidth to be able to actually bring a team on and scale that team,” Frank said. The company has about half a dozen engineers now, including some who previously worked at Blue Origin and SpaceX, and plans to grow to 15 to 20 by the end of the year.

“That $3 million pre-seed funding is a bridge to allow us to build a team and get to the seed round,” he said. The company didn’t disclose details about the timing or size of that seed round.

Frank added that while Ekblaw is a co-founder of the company, she will remain focused on her organization, the Aurelia Institute. “We’re going to continue to work with Aurelia as kind of our think tank,” he said. “They’re going to continue to look at things like habitats and human applications in space, and if there’s anything interesting that comes out of that, we have the rights to that as well.”