May's Space Dirt 🚀 (month-end)

I thought breaking up Space Dirt into two issues would make it less dense, but here we are with another packed issue.

Enjoy!

REAL ESTATE HIGHLIGHTS

Planetary Utilities leased 3,579 SF at 128 W Walnut Ave, Monrovia, CA. (source: Me!)

Splash Industries leased 3,800 SF at 8915 S La Cienega Blvd, Inglewood, CA. (source: LinkedIn)

Hivewatch leased 11,277 SF at 134 Main Street, El Segundo, CA. (source: Me!)

EVgo leased 16,756 SF at 1661 E Franklin Ave, El Segundo, CA. (source: Me!)

Icarus leased 6,000 SF at 120 Penn Street, El Segundo, CA. (source: Me!)

Stell moved to BLANKSPACES Venice at 606 Venice Blvd, Los Angeles, CA. (source: Me!)

Aurelius Systems leased 9,500 SF at 515 Folsom St, San Francisco, CA. (source: Me!)

Florida Today is reporting that a confidential aerospace company, identified as Project Beep, plans to invest $247 million to develop facilities near NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, potentially creating 1,000 high-wage jobs. The venture proposes developing manufacturing, research, warehousing, and administrative infrastructure on a 25-acre parcel in Exploration Park, a space industry hub managed by NASA and Space Florida. The project involves a 30-year land lease with Space Florida at Exploration Park, which already houses facilities for Blue Origin and Airbus. (sources: Space Insider via LinkedIn and Florida Today)

STEALTH NO MORE

Open source robotics startup, K-Scale Labs’ Founder and CEO, Benjamin Bolte, came out of stealth with a LinkedIn post. Investors in K-scale Labs include Y Combinator, AI Grant, Fellows Fund, GFT Ventures, Lombardstreet Ventures, Ninja Capital, and others.

Mandala Space Ventures announced the launch of its portfolio company, Sophia Space. Sophia Space introduces a revolutionary space architecture that leverages the natural advantages of space, including its source of energy and cooling, to deliver sustainable, scalable, AI edge computing in space for the benefit of humanity. The startup’s modular data centers will be particularly useful for intelligence gathering, disaster monitoring, and disaster management, Leon Alkalai, Sophia Co-founder and retired NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory technical fellow, told SpaceNews. Robert Demillo is the other Co-Founder and is the CEO. Sophia also raised $3.5 million in pre-seed funding to develop orbiting compute and data centers with key geospatial intelligence applications. Unlock Venture Partners led the Sophia Space investment round. Angel investors and industry leaders also participated. (source: SpaceNews)

AI company Schemata Co-Founder and CEO, James Brown, announced $5 million in seed funding and came out of stealth via a LinkedIn post. The funding will be used to accelerate the development of its training platform. The company’s 3D reality capture, spatial AI, and contextual information can help the defense and enterprise sectors more rapidly and cost-effectively create photorealistic and interactive training programs. Demand is strong, with Schemata already being awarded $3.4 million in Department of Defense (DoD) contracts over the past eight months. Schemata’s oversubscribed funding round includes investments from prominent venture capital firms, led by Owl Ventures, with participation from a16z speedrun, Alumni Ventures, Anorak Ventures, and Time Zero Capital. (source: Venture Beat)

In a LinkedIn post, Y Combinator announced Jeevy Fabrication, an AI-driven weld fabrication contractor focused on expanding the overall capacity of the U.S. welding industry. By tackling deep-rooted inefficiencies, they deliver lower-cost solutions to companies like SpaceX, Joby Aviation, and CFS—while simultaneously increasing weld shop capacity to take on more work. A complex job that would normally fall into a long queue of a select few shops can now be matched to multiple shops that have the correct capabilities across them and the correct spare capacity. Additionally, hours that would normally be spent on project management tasks, such as BOM and schedule generation, can be completed 80% faster, increasing the time spent actually welding. The founders, Jeevesh Konuru and Vinay Konuru, are brothers.

El Segundo, CA-based HABIT emerged from stealth via a LinkedIn post from Y Combinator. HABIT is building the first robotic car detailer. It combines the speed and convenience of an automatic wash with the premium services of a human detailer. Founders Michael Trehan and Harish Palani are car enthusiasts who met at UC Berkeley. Harish was an AI/ML Applied Scientist at Twitch/Amazon, and Michael was a Senior SWE at Radiant Nuclear and an Investment Banker at J.P. Morgan. Together, they’re working on deploying HABIT centers nationwide. 

Eric Jorgenson announced his investment in mining company Watoga Technologies via a LinkedIn post, which, I believe, also launched the company out of stealth. The team splits time between El Segundo and Montreal. Team members include Co-Founder and CEO Elliot Forcier-Poirier, Samuel Desjardins, and Co-Founder and CTO Roko Baljak.

Heron Power emerged from stealth via an X post from its Founder and CEO, Drew Baglino. It is developing solid-state transformers for the electric grid. According to reports, Heron Power is raising between $30 million to $50 million for a Series A, with Capricorn Investment Group pegged to lead the round. Baglino was a longtime employee at Tesla, starting at the company in 2006, two years before Elon Musk took over as CEO. He rose through the ranks, designing the powertrain for the first Model S and leading engineering for Tesla’s battery storage products before being named senior vice president of powertrain and energy. (source: TechCrunch)

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REAL ESTATE CORNER

JOB BOARD

I've heard Hardware FYI is a great resource for engineers (and others in the hard tech community) seeking their next opportunity. Here’s a link to their latest newsletter, which links to a bunch of open roles (scroll down a bit to “Open Jobs”).

NOTABLE FUNDINGS

El Segundo, CA’s CX2 raised a $31 million Series A. The round was led by Point72 Ventures with participation from existing investors Andreessen Horowitz and 8VC, as well as new investors 201 Ventures, Pax Ventures, and Upfront Ventures. CX2 builds software and hardware, including autonomous drones and specialty signals-intelligence payloads. The funding will accelerate the development of CX2's product suite and enable the company to expand its team, which has grown from four founders to more than twenty employees in its first year. (sources: Bow of Theseus (founder Nathan Mintz’s Substack) and Axios)

Radiant closed a $165 million Series C funding round. That brings its total venture funding to $225 million ahead of its planned test next year of the first new U.S. reactor design in more than 50 years. This latest round, led by DCVC, now includes new investments from Giant Ventures, StepStone Group, Hanwha Asset Management Venture Fund, SGA Capital, Crossbeam Venture Partners, Align Ventures, the ARK Venture Fund, Gigascale Capital, HartBeat Ventures, and Pax Ventures. This announcement comes just a month after the U.S. Department of Energy selected Radiant as one of just five companies in the United States to receive high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU) fuel. (source: LinkedIn)

Alameda, CA-based Saildrone has announced a $60 million investment round led by the Export and Investment Fund of Denmark (EIFO). The investment will help Saildrone bring its marine surveillance technology, based on long-endurance unmanned surface vehicles, to European shores. In addition to EIFO, other participants in the round included Lux Capital, Washington Harbour Partners LP, Crowley, Academy Securities, and Pinegrove Venture Partners. Saildrone’s founder and CEO, Richard Jenkins, added: “I am thrilled to partner with EIFO and the Danish government to establish Saildrone’s European headquarters in Copenhagen, Denmark.” (source: Defense Post via LinkedIn)

Zeno Power secured $50 million in its latest funding round. The Series B was led by Hanaco Ventures. Other backers include Seraphim, Balerion Space Ventures, and Vanderbilt University. The company has inked contracts with the U.S. Defense Department and NASA, totaling tens of millions of dollars. The nuclear-battery maker now plans to roughly double its workforce and do full-scale system demonstrations next year. Zeno's batteries convert the decay of radioactive material into thermal and electrical power. (source: Axios)

Bulgaria-based microsatellite specialist EnduroSat announced $49 million in funding to ramp up production of a larger and more capable class of satellites. The new funds will help build out a 17,500-square-meter facility in Sofia, Bulgaria’s capital, designed to produce up to 60 satellites per month by the end of the year. Founders Fund, the venture capital firm backed by billionaire Peter Thiel and an early investor in SpaceX, led the 43 million euro funding round. CEECAT Capital, Morphosis Capital, and other returning investors also participated. (source: SpaceNews)

Albuquerque, NM-based space solar power startup mPower Technology closed a $21 million Series B to help scale production of its solar modules. Razor’s Edge Ventures led the round, which also included participation from Shield Capital. The funding allows mPower to expand its automated manufacturing line for its flexible solar array tech as well as grow its workforce, CEO Kevin Hell told Payload in a statement. (source: Payload)

Solestial raised a $17 million Series A and announced a new CEO, Margo de Naray, who comes over from Astra. AE Ventures led the round, which closed earlier this year. Crosscut Ventures, Zeon Ventures, and Mitsubishi Electric Corporation’s innovation fund also joined existing investors. The company has raised $29 million in an effort to become the power source of choice for an increasing number of spacecraft in orbit. Stanislau Herasimenka, the former Arizona State University researcher who co-founded Solestial as its CEO, will become the company’s CTO. (source: Payload)

Glacier is an AI and robotics company helping the recycling industry create a world without waste and has recently completed its $16 million Series A funding round led by Ecosystem Integrity Fund (EIF), with participation from existing investors including New Enterprise Associates, AlleyCorp, Overture Climate VC, Amazon Climate Pledge Fund and VSC Ventures. New investors include Elysium, Overlap Holdings, Cox Exponential, Alumni Ventures, One Small Planet, and Working Capital Fund. The investment caps a breakthrough period for Glacier, which has expanded its presence across the U.S. in major markets like San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit, and Phoenix. With Glacier's robots, the facility aims to improve the recovery and purity rate of recyclable materials. (source: Waste Dive) 

InfinitForm has closed a $12.7 million seed round, led by UP.Partners, with participation from Schematic Ventures, Counterpart Ventures, Yamaha Motor Ventures, and former Autodesk CEO Carl Bass. InfinitForm’s mission is to empower engineers to create production-ready CAD faster than ever before. InfinitForm is transforming how engineers move from concept to production-ready geometry—using AI to deliver manufacturable, cost-efficient, and high-performance CAD models faster than ever before. (source: LinkedIn)

PiLogic announced the closing of a $4 million seed round, led by Scout Ventures and Seraphim Space, with participation from Flex Capital, FN Fund, and investor Gokul Rajaram. The company’s first products will be software models for tracking space debris and diagnosing satellite malfunctions. With its capital, the company plans to increase its staff from five to around fifteen people, hiring AI experts to develop and deploy these models. (source: Payload)  

AGREEMENTS, PARTNERSHIPS, & CONTRACTS

Motorola Solutions announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Silvus Technologies for $4.4 billion in up-front consideration. Based in Los Angeles, CA, Silvus designs and develops software-defined high-speed mobile ad-hoc network (MANET) technology that enables highly secure data, video and voice communications without the need for fixed infrastructure. Silvus’ wide range of customers spans autonomous systems manufacturers, military, law enforcement and enterprises around the world. (source: Motorola Solutions)

Rocket Lab is acquiring Geost from the private equity firm ATL Partners for $125 million in cash and $150 million in stock, with an additional $50 million in potential cash payments tied to revenue targets in 2026 and 2027. The acquisition gives Rocket Lab access to satellite sensor technology used by the U.S. Department of Defense for missile warning systems and space surveillance — capabilities that could help it win lucrative Pentagon contracts. (source: SpaceNews)

SpaceX completed the purchase of Akoustis, a specialty RF filter firm, out of bankruptcy for $30.2 million. Akoustis was founded in 2014 by a group that included several former employees of a rival component maker, called Qorvo. Qorvo sued Akoustis in 2021, alleging patent infringement and trade secret misappropriation. A federal judge agreed, according to court documents, ruling that Akoustis owed $60M in damages. The penalties put Akoustis on the path to bankruptcy; it filed for Chapter 11 relief in December 2024. Besides Akoustis’ intellectual property, SpaceX may also have wanted the company’s 125,000 SF clean room manufacturing facility. Akoustis was part of a DARPA program developing RF filters for high-frequency military satellites, including covering spectrum bands used by SpaceX. Akoustis also had a contract to supply a satellite company, which may have been SpaceX itself. (source: Payload)

CenCore has been exclusively awarded a $19 million contract with the United States Department of Defense (DoD) and the United States Marine Corps (USMC) to build cutting-edge mobile Sensitive Compartmented Information Facilities (SCIFs). CenCore delivers U.S.-made, tech-agnostic, open-source security systems that support global secure communications and prioritize cost-effective, high-performance solutions over superficial appeal. (source: PR Newswire)

Valar Atomics and the state of Utah are partnering to have a new nuclear test reactor operating in the state in one year, company founder Isaiah Taylor and Gov. Spencer Cox announced. Taylor said the reactor will be developed at the San Rafael Energy Research Center in Emery County, which was purchased by the state last year. “Our goal is by when the Winter Olympics come back to Utah in 2034, that we will have operational nuclear reactors, lots of them from Valar and others right here in the state of Utah and all across the country,” said Cox. (source: The Salt Lake Tribune)

Procurement and logistics management company Cofactr acquired the custom manufacturing marketplace, Cogbase, adding 450,000 North American suppliers to Cofactr’s network. The deal expands Cofactr’s ability to help manufacturers optimize their entire supply chains, from off-the-shelf parts to custom hardware. It also comes at a critical time for U.S. manufacturers, who are racing to onshore their supply chains in response to the Trump administration’s tariffs. (source: Payload)

Nikon Advanced Manufacturing announced that it has entered into a development agreement with the National Center for Defense Manufacturing and Machining (NCDMM), manager of America Makes, to advance the use of Constellium’s Aheadd CP1 aluminum alloy in Additive Manufacturing, particularly for defense and aerospace applications. This $2.1 million project – funded by the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense, Manufacturing Technology Office (OSD ManTech) through America Makes – encompasses the first two phases of the multi-phase program. (source: Metal-AM)

WHAT I’M CONSUMING (AND ENJOYING!) 

🔊 Venus Aerospace announced it successfully completed the first U.S. flight test of a next-generation rocket engine: a Rotating Detonation Rocket Engine (RDRE). This milestone marks a breakthrough in American aerospace, with a design ultimately aimed at enabling vehicles to travel four to six times the speed of sound from a conventional runway. The demonstration took place at Spaceport America in New Mexico.

🎯 Lots of familiar names in this WaPo article: Startups are trying to close the U.S. hypersonic missile gap with China.

⚙️ Eclipse Capital lays out how the U.S. can build a (better) modern system of domestic manufacturing in this deep dive.

🔒 Andrew Cote wrote an article, The Dynamics of Drone Defense, which breaks down the primary categories of drone defense systems, starting with detection and tracking and running through various kill methods.

📈 SBIR Ignite provides an opportunity for small businesses to use NASA as a stepping stone on the path toward commercial success. This initiative is ideal for high-growth, product-oriented entrepreneurs, startups, and small businesses that have not previously worked with NASA. There will be four AMAs in June if you’d like to learn more.

⚒ The global transition to clean energy depends on critical minerals. The problem is that the U.S. is incredibly reliant on China for its minerals, even if it mines them itself. In an immersive Substack, Nkechi Iregbulem of MVP Ventures lays out this problem and then calls on companies interested in building a full-stack business around tech-enabled mining to reach out.

📕 Fresh off its annual conference in Albuquerque, NM, New Space Nexus released its latest State of the Space Industrial Base report.

📻 Experimental kamikaze fiber-optic FPV drones, which cannot be jammed, have been developed, enabling them to penetrate previously thought safe spaces on the Ukrainian battlefield.

HOW I CAN HELP YOU

Some people only know me as “that Space Dirt newsletter guy.” Although I love that moniker, here are 3* ways I can help with your hard tech real estate when the time is right.

1. A new home for your growing business. The good news - you’re growing! The bad news - you need to move, and you don’t know the hard tech real estate market. I can help. And I come with strong references.

2. Sublease your space. You’ve outgrown your space and need to move but don’t want to pay two rents? I got you.

3. Time to renew your lease? Want to make sure you’re getting a fair deal from your Landlord? In my experience, you can never be too certain. (BTW, I recommend starting the lease renewal process 12 months out at a minimum.)

*Not an exhaustive list 💪

Thanks for reading.

If you’d like your office and/or manufacturing space or business profiled - or even your city! - let me know. It’s always fun to explore and share the different components of the hard tech industry.

Erik Stiebel
Founder and Vice President
CA DRE License #02080746
424.241.4795 | [email protected] 
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