Announcing our $6.5 million seed round

With funding from Sequoia, Starship Ventures, and others

2024-09-24

Reflect Orbital sells sunlight from orbit to solar farms and large-scale lighting applications after sunset using a very large constellation of in-space reflectors. Today, we are excited to announce our $6.5m seed round led by Shaun Maguire at Sequoia Capital, with participation from Starship Ventures, Baiju Bhatt, Keller Rinaudo Cliffton, and Keenan Wyrobek. This funding will take us to space and enables us to grow a team that will develop our production vehicles. Partnering with a legendary VC to build space-based energy infrastructure is incredibly exciting, and we represent Sequoia’s first investment in space technology since SpaceX. Together, we see a future where revolutionary launch capability enables companies like us to exist at massive scales.


We believe more sunlight can help provide humanity with the energy required to maintain and improve living standards globally. Creating more clean solar energy is the highest leverage improvement we can make to everyone’s lives on Earth right now. Reflect provides a near-inexhaustible fundamental resource – sunlight – and serves the largely overlooked demand for sunlight after sunset. We benefit from and recognize the convergence of three factors that facilitate our growth:

1) The space launch industry has invested billions to develop lower cost transportation infrastructure (i.e big rockets) that we can simply use. Because of this, getting to the place with a nearly endless supply of sunlight – space – is becoming easier and more affordable. 

2) More solar is built today than any other energy technology, and it continues to get cheaper and more widespread. The biggest drawback of solar is that it doesn’t work at night, which we address.


3) Few realize how much sunlight everyone on Earth uses everyday just to visually understand their surroundings. Because we sell a big spot of sunlight at night, we can help people see things at night over large areas as if it were daytime. And almost more importantly, this is a capability we can begin providing with our first satellite.

And we feel that humanity is just beginning to understand the potential of commercial space. Space still feels new, but humanity has had this feeling before, first journeying into new land tens of thousands of years ago, then exploring the oceans, then the skies. It is rare to be on the cusp of a new operational regime for business and resourcing. Space can support human activity in ways we cannot currently imagine. 


In the last three months, we’ve brought expertise in deployable space structures and optics into our team. We also moved into our new warehouse in Hawthorne, right near SpaceX HQ, which gives us the free space we need to prototype large space structures. We are focused on our highly specular, deployable reflector that is the cornerstone of the service we provide.


Our future is defined by hundreds of launches and low-cost satellites mass manufactured at unheard of scales, which means we can explore new regions of satellite design-space, and our reflectors will only become larger with time. We have conviction that our vehicle architecture, based on tensioned thin-film reflectors, is the most efficient way to capture large amounts of energy from space and bring it down to earth from a cost and feasibility standpoint.


Two weeks ago, we released our new homegrown website featuring a sneak-peak at our lighting service. Excitingly, our announcement took off even more than we expected. More than 55 million people viewed our short concept video, which generated >180,000 applications. This represents notable public excitement that fuels conviction in our lighting use case. 


Alongside the development of our lighting capability, we’ve continued to grow a responsible approach to our service selection process. We have developed a precise understanding of the nature of our light, and can carefully craft a sunlight service plan around a wide variety of constraints. We do not want to create something that impairs humanity’s freedom to live in and enjoy a more natural environment. Moreover, we’re highly incentivized to make sure all of the sunlight that hits our satellites goes where it will be sold, and not to places where it isn’t desired. Sunlight that doesn’t hit its target isn’t just unsellable – it actively hampers our ability to grow our business, because it will be impossible to scale irresponsibly. 


We’re working to bring something entirely new and useful to Earth that is a sure sign we’re living in a great future, and are growing a world-class team rapidly. If you like working on novel problems, failing fast, owning a huge amount, questioning existing design paradigms, and building technology that has a purpose, we encourage you to reach out or apply through our careers page!

And we feel that humanity is just beginning to understand the potential of commercial space. Space still feels new, but humanity has had this feeling before, first journeying into new land tens of thousands of years ago, then exploring the oceans, then the skies. It is rare to be on the cusp of a new operational regime for business and resourcing. Space can support human activity in ways we cannot currently imagine. 


In the last three months, we’ve brought expertise in deployable space structures and optics into our team. We also moved into our new warehouse in Hawthorne, right near SpaceX HQ, which gives us the free space we need to prototype large space structures. We are focused on our highly specular, deployable reflector that is the cornerstone of the service we provide.


Our future is defined by hundreds of launches and low-cost satellites mass manufactured at unheard of scales, which means we can explore new regions of satellite design-space, and our reflectors will only become larger with time. We have conviction that our vehicle architecture, based on tensioned thin-film reflectors, is the most efficient way to capture large amounts of energy from space and bring it down to earth from a cost and feasibility standpoint.


Two weeks ago, we released our new homegrown website featuring a sneak-peak at our lighting service. Excitingly, our announcement took off even more than we expected. More than 55 million people viewed our short concept video, which generated >180,000 applications. This represents notable public excitement that fuels conviction in our lighting use case. 


Alongside the development of our lighting capability, we’ve continued to grow a responsible approach to our service selection process. We have developed a precise understanding of the nature of our light, and can carefully craft a sunlight service plan around a wide variety of constraints. We do not want to create something that impairs humanity’s freedom to live in and enjoy a more natural environment. Moreover, we’re highly incentivized to make sure all of the sunlight that hits our satellites goes where it will be sold, and not to places where it isn’t desired. Sunlight that doesn’t hit its target isn’t just unsellable – it actively hampers our ability to grow our business, because it will be impossible to scale irresponsibly. 


We’re working to bring something entirely new and useful to Earth that is a sure sign we’re living in a great future, and are growing a world-class team rapidly. If you like working on novel problems, failing fast, owning a huge amount, questioning existing design paradigms, and building technology that has a purpose, we encourage you to reach out or apply through our careers page!

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Reflect Orbital™

All Rights Reserved.