Astranis Space Technologies Corp.

Astranis builds small satellites for high orbits, which for most of the satellite industry was considered a contradiction. Founded in San Francisco in 2015 by John Gedmark and Ryan McLinko, the company set out to shrink a geostationary communications spacecraft from several tonnes to a few hundred kilograms by hardening commercial electronics against radiation and replacing fixed transponders with a software defined radio that can be retuned from the ground. Around 500 people work there. A 450 million dollar Series E co-led by Snowpoint Ventures and Franklin Templeton closed in May 2026, taking total funding past 1.2 billion dollars against a stated commercial backlog above a billion.

The commercial half of the business sells dedicated capacity rather than a share of a large fleet. One customer, one satellite, parked over the country it serves. Arcturus flew for Pacific Dataport of Alaska in 2023 and reached 8.5 gigabits per second before a solar array drive fault ended its working life. A four spacecraft Falcon 9 mission at the end of 2024 carried Agila for Orbits Corp of the Philippines, two NuView satellites for the inflight connectivity provider Anuvu and UtilitySat, a multi-band gap filler whose electric propulsion failed in transfer orbit. The Anuvu pair entered service in August 2025 as a privately owned geostationary network. Later orders cover Apco Networks in Mexico, Thaicom in Thailand, Chunghwa Telecom in Taiwan and MB Group in Oman. Services are sold as cell backhaul, managed capacity, mobility and short duration flexible missions.

Government work has become the second engine. The pitch to the Pentagon is a proliferated architecture across every orbit, with a layer of many small and replaceable geostationary satellites standing in for a handful of exquisite ones that an adversary can count. Astranis positions itself as a prime contractor rather than a supplier, and its Nexus design, drawn from a MicroGPS class spacecraft for medium orbit, was picked up under the Space Force Resilient GPS effort after a March 2025 demonstration in which the company transmitted core GPS signals. It was one of five firms given design work under Protected Tactical SATCOM Global in 2025, though the first production awards a year later went elsewhere. In April 2026 it joined the Andromeda multiple award vehicle for space based space domain awareness, and in August 2026 it revealed Perceptor, a maneuverable inspection spacecraft on the flown MicroGEO bus whose electric propulsion lets it work the whole geostationary belt. Vanguard, announced in late 2025, moves the company off the satellite itself and into a deployable mobile ad hoc network for beyond line of sight voice and video, built with Persistent Systems radios and Kymeta and Satcube terminals. The larger Omega spacecraft, roughly 600 kilograms and rated above 50 gigabits per second, is the volume product the factory is being tooled around.