Star Catcher raises $65 million for space power grid

WASHINGTON — Star Catcher Industries, a company developing power-beaming technology for satellites, has raised $65 million to validate the technology in space.

Star Catcher said May 12 it closed a Series A round led by B Capital with Shield Capital and Cerberus Ventures, the venture arm of Cerberus Capital Management. The round brings the total raised by the company to $88 million.

Star Catcher plans to use the funding to test its technology to provide additional power to satellites by focusing sunlight on their solar panels. The company has tested the technology on the ground, including in a football stadium and at the former space shuttle runway at the Kennedy Space Center.

“We’re taking a very hardware-rich, crawl-walk-run approach to demonstrating that we own the technology stack to do space-to-space power beaming with a series of ground demonstrations,” said Andrew Rush, chief executive of Star Catcher, in an interview. “The go-forward plan for us is to do the same thing, but in space: do a series of orbital power-beaming demonstrations.”

Star Catcher is planning its first in-space demonstration mission later this year. The company has already tested some supporting technologies, such as acquisition and tracking software, on a Loft Orbital satellite in late 2025.

That upcoming demonstration mission, along with a second mission to follow, “will position us for going operational and for scaling,” he said.

The company, based in Jacksonville, Florida, has about 40 employees and expects to grow “in a meaningful way” with the new funding round, he said. “We’ll be actively hiring across every discipline.”

The company is also working to attract both commercial and government customers for its future power-beaming satellites. It has recently highlighted orbital data centers, which will require large amounts of power, as one potential set of customers.

“It’s our view that the early adopters are the folks that have power-dense, power-intense operations and payloads,” Rush said. That includes orbital data centers as well as direct-to-device communications satellites and synthetic aperture radar imaging satellites.

Star Catcher has $60 million in signed contracts for in-space power delivery and a $3 billion pipeline of prospective customers, which expand beyond those early adopters. “Fundamentally, at some point every spacecraft will need our service, whether that is to have an opportunity to extend the life of the spacecraft or recover or provide additional resiliency for national security assets, or to supercharge or to have energy to maneuver,” he said.

As part of the funding round, Star Catcher is adding several people to its board, including retired Space Force Gen. Jay Raymond, the first chief of space operations of the service and now a senior managing director at Cerberus.

“Persistent surveillance, resilient communications and unhindered maneuverability are all constrained today by power,” he said in a statement. “An on-demand power grid can change that, expanding critical capabilities across commercial and national security missions.”

Also joining the board are Jeff Johnson, general partner and global head of energy at B Capital, and David Rothzeid, principal at Shield.

“There is exploding demand, limited shared infrastructure and a generational opportunity for the company capable of building the first in-orbit grid,” Johnson said in a statement. “We strongly believe Star Catcher is that company.”

Rush said that the ability of satellite developers to tap into a power grid in orbit will enable them to modify their designs and address one aspect of what is known in the space industry as SWaP, or size, weight and power.

“In the same way that reusable launch vehicles really open up the aperture on the size and weight part of the equation,” he said, “we can open up the aperture on the power part of the SWaP equation that governs all space missions.”