LeoLabs, Inc.

LeoLabs came out of SRI International in 2016 on a single premise. Radar built for atmospheric research could be rebuilt cheaply enough to watch low Earth orbit continuously and sell the result commercially. The Menlo Park company now runs a proliferated network of phased array radars that tracks more than 27,000 objects in low and very low orbit, including debris down to roughly two centimetres across, and it sells that picture to military space commands, civil agencies, insurers and satellite operators. Orbit solutions come in under fifteen metres of accuracy, and the network logs a couple of thousand maneuver detections a day. The company calls the output persistent orbital intelligence.

Radar hardware is the capital asset. The network grew from the Poker Flat Incoherent Scatter Radar in Alaska and the Midland Space Radar in Texas to the Kiwi Space Radar in Central Otago, the Costa Rica Space Radar in Guanacaste, and later installations in the Azores, Argentina and Western Australia, reaching eleven radars across seven sites by late 2025. A Seeker class ultra high frequency direct radiating array switched on in Arizona at the end of 2024, adding sensitivity for smaller and dimmer objects. Scout came next as a transportable class, engineered so that a three dimensional search radar can be flown into theatre, stood up and moved again. The first Scout-S went to Hawaii in 2026 and worked the Valiant Shield exercise, the first field use of the type.

Above the radars sits a cloud platform that turns tracks into ephemerides, conjunction data messages and orbit change events. Tracking gives an operator independent confirmation of where its own satellites actually are, which matters when the alternative is trusting someone else's catalog. Conjunction alerts warn of close approaches early enough to maneuver. Launch support sorts and identifies new payloads in the hours after separation, a job that grows harder with every rideshare dropping dozens of objects into nearly identical orbits. Threat assessment is the defense line of the business and space traffic management is the civil and commercial one. In 2026 the company shipped Delta, an AI layer for national security users that replaced the earlier LeoGuard product and folds event detection, characterisation and pattern of life analysis into one operator dashboard.

Money has come from both directions. A 65 million dollar Series B closed in 2021 and a further 29 million dollars arrived in early 2024, while a SpaceWERX award and a Space Force tactical funding increase paid part of the Scout development. LeoLabs was selected for the Space Systems Command Space Domain Awareness TAP Lab accelerator, and revenue roughly doubled during 2024 on contracts with United States and allied government agencies. Missile defense is the stated next mission area, an extension of the same measurement problem into warning rather than safety.