CesiumAstro

Shey Sabripour spent three decades at Lockheed Martin and then Firefly Aerospace before founding CesiumAstro in Austin in 2017, and the company inverted the usual order of building a space business. Payloads came first, satellites afterwards. That choice let the phased array antennas be designed for commercial production volumes rather than for one bespoke spacecraft, and it is the reason CesiumAstro now sells hardware to primes that would ordinarily build their own. Money has arrived in steps, from a $12.4 million Series A led by Airbus Ventures in 2019 through a $65 million round led by Trousdale Ventures in mid 2024 to a $470 million Series C in February 2026 that combined $270 million of equity with a $200 million package from the Export-Import Bank of the United States and J.P. Morgan. More than 250 engineers work across a Colorado design and engineering site opened at Broomfield in 2020, further operations in California, the United Kingdom, Germany and Japan, and a new 270,000 square foot headquarters going up near Austin.

The communication systems business is the anchor. Vireo is a multi beam active electronically scanned Ka band payload sold in two sizes, the Ka 576 and the Ka 288, and it was picked by Raytheon for seven Space Development Agency Tranche 1 Tracking Layer satellites and by Rocket Lab for eighteen Tranche 2 Transport Layer vehicles. Nightingale is the single beam Ka band payload and the foundation of the software defined radio work, reprogrammable in orbit and flown for positioning, navigation and timing and for data downlink after reaching technology readiness level nine in 2023. Both descend from the same phased array core.

Underneath the payloads sit the processors and modules that CesiumAstro also sells on their own. The Reconfigurable Processing Unit provides full duplex multi channel signal processing across several frequency bands and can be reconfigured on orbit. Around it are a family of ruggedized 3U SpaceVPX software defined radios, the SDR-3104, SDR-2104, SDR-2051 and SDR-1001, along with a reconfigurable digital processor, a power supply module and a single board computer. Customers buy them as standalone units, inside the processing unit or embedded in a Vireo architecture.

Mission systems and the spacecraft line close the loop. Element is a fully integrated low Earth orbit satellite carrying the company's own phased array payloads, and Skylark is a provider agnostic mobile SATCOM terminal for aircraft, vehicles and ground stations, extending the same technology off orbit. Government work runs deep. CesiumAstro was selected to support the Ground based Midcourse Defense Weapon System In-flight Interceptor Communications System for the Missile Defense Agency, supplied radios to NASA Marshall for LunaNet lunar navigation, flew communications for the NASA Starling formation flying mission and won work on Taiwan's first national low Earth orbit communications constellation. Eight SpaceX rideshare launches are booked for on orbit validation.