Space DOTS raises $1.5M seed round to provide insights on orbital threats

Summary

The corporate space world tired Bianca Cefalo to the point that she found it easier to literally start her own space company and launch objects into orbit. Cefalo is the founder of Space DOTs, which launched in 2022 to detect space threats. She and her team have created a software platform called SKY-I for space tech manufacturers and operators to help them detect, interpret, and attribute natural and human-originated threats in orbit. She’s spent decades in the industry, working on projects that have put objects on the moon and launched satellites into orbit. She worked as a thermofluid dynamic analyst on the NASA Insight Mission to Mars and was a product manager at Airbus Defence and Space, working on telecommunication satellites. She found, however, that industry politics and corporate bureaucracy were bottlenecks to progress. “I got bored of the game,” she told TechCrunch. She recalled that every time she would pitch an idea to her last employer, she was met with resistance. “The response was the same, ‘if it hasn’t flown already, we’re not using it on our satellite,’” she recalled. “We were told to innovate, but they refused to adopt anything unproven … I was hired to be an ‘innovator’ inside a corporate giant, but in reality I was being told ‘not too much.’” And in that, she rewrote the rules. Cefalo said that nearly 15% of spacecraft experience some type of anomaly or failure due to manufacturers’ and operations’ misunderstanding of what space is actually like. Techcrunch event San Francisco | October 27-29, 2025 “Ground simulations can only model so much. The real environment is more complex and every orbital regime is different,” she said. For example, what might work in a low orbit won’t necessarily work in deep space. Radiation alone can cause various mishaps that lead to spacecraft failure, while other accidents in space are dismissed as glitches or ‘space weather,’ because there isn’t enough data to explain what is actually happening. “Space DOTS fixes ...