CesiumAstro Inc. (“Cesium” or “Company”) has secured $60 million in an oversubscribed Series B funding round, co-led by Airbus Ventures and Forever Ventures, with strategic participation from L3Harris Technologies (NYSE: LHX) — returning investors include Kleiner Perkins, Lavrock Ventures, Franklin Templeton Blackhorse Fund, and HEICO (NYSE: HEI).
CesiumAstro has raised nearly $90 million in capital since the firm’s founding in 2017. With this latest financing, Cesium will accelerate the growth of its core research, development, and rapid manufacturing capabilities, and expand its facilities both domestically and abroad.
Cesium’s products are designed to address a wide set of applications, including satellite and drone communications, missile defense and in-flight connectivity (IFC). At the heart of these products is the company’s ability to deliver the full stack of Active Electronically Steered Arrays (AESAs): Cesium offers a modular ecosystem of hardware and software with RF and antenna front-ends that cover critical space frequency allocations, along with a common reconfigurable digital back-end to address mission needs for high-throughput communication, under even the tightest budgetary and schedule constraints.
Encompassing more than 80 engineers, scientists, and business professionals with in-house rapid prototyping and environmental test capability, the Company has grown a full suite of capabilities across development, production, and deployment of high-reliability systems. The company is set to deploy several additional assets into space later this year, with targeted launch dates to be announced in the coming months.
“We are honored to have strong support from our new and existing investors. With their backing, we are now set to scale the Company and realize the full potential of our proprietary technology,” said Shey Sabripour, Founder and CEO of CesiumAstro. “This investment is a key endorsement of our ability to deliver advanced communication systems to both our commercial and defense customers and fully secures our growth trajectory.”
“Teaming with CesiumAstro reflects our strategy of partnering across industry to rapidly develop advanced multi-domain solutions that address our customers’ critical needs,” said Christopher E. Kubasik, Vice Chair and Chief Executive Officer, L3Harris. “Incorporating CesiumAstro’s technologies will enhance our existing resilient space and communications solutions, while we collaborate with their agile technical team to help develop entirely new approaches that drive our next-generation innovations.”
Headquartered in Austin, Texas, with offices in Broomfield, Colorado, CesiumAstro builds high-throughput, plug-and-play active phased array communication payloads for airborne and in-orbit platforms. Cesium’s full-stack, multi-mission hardware and software products enable a range of commercial and defense objectives.
