SCOUT Inc. has successfully closed a bridge round that will enable significant growth of their capabilities in 2022. This funding round strategically positions SCOUT to better capitalize on opportunities in early 2022 and hit key milestones, including SCOUT-Vision production readiness and the launch of SCOUT’s first OVER-Sat mission in 2023. SCOUT is looking forward to connecting with more investors on the next fundraising Seed round, which opened earlier this month.
Decisive Point, a venture capital firm that invests in dual-use technology startups, led the round with follow-on participation from the Virginia Innovation Partnership Corporation and Geospatial Alpha.
Over the past year, SCOUT has made significant progress in terms of technology development and business expansion. Since June of 2021, SCOUT has been successfully operating in space, following the launch of their SCOUT-Vision proximity operation system. In December of 2021, Momentus selected SCOUT to deliver spacecraft vision capabilities for its upcoming missions.
Most recently, SCOUT announced their Autonomy Software for spacecraft, which includes computer vision and guidance software to make navigation safer and less complex for space operators. These offerings include software-hardware integration providing: next-generation AI/ML-based autonomy, hybrid data fusion from various sensors and closed-loop optical navigation control algorithms.
SCOUT, to date, has raised $1.5 million in venture capital.
“Being a dual-use technology company, it’s important to have strategic investors that can help us better speak the language of the Defense and greater Intelligence Community, and to help us navigate the intricacies of those organizations, all of which Decisive Point has tremendous expertise in,” said Eric Ingram, Co-founder and CEO of SCOUT. “This round helps us build critical programs and infrastructure for SCOUT-Vision’s market readiness and accelerates us towards OVER-Sat’s launch scheduled for next year. Decisive Point recognizes the value SCOUT is bringing to the space and national defense segments, and the impending need for more verification and validation capabilities in orbit.”
“In recent years, we have seen incredible growth in the Space Domain Awareness (SDA) commercial and defense market. Space Traffic will only continue to become more congested (projected to grow by more than 40x by 2023) and existing ground-based sensors cannot keep up with the growing defense and commercial space population,” said Thomas Hendrix, Managing Partner of Decisive Point. “SCOUT is changing the way space operations are executed by building vision-based autonomy solutions for Earth and space, enabling systems to better identify and avoid risks and failures through their SCOUT-Vision product. SCOUT’s technology solution has already demonstrated 1000x better resolution compared to current capabilities and is poised to disrupt the SDA market.”
“Support and validation from our incredible investors have enabled SCOUT’s rapid execution over the past years,” Sergio Gallucci, Co-founder and CTO of SCOUT, said. “In the last nine months, we successfully demonstrated SCOUT-Vision, and this is only the start of a period of hyper-growth where we’re bringing SCOUT-Vision to the aerospace marketplace and building a strong foundation for deploying our solutions.”
SCOUT was founded in 2019 with the mission to enable a new era of space safety and transparency. SCOUT’s in-space products and services, first launched in June 2021, allow spacecraft to see and understand things around them. The orbital distributed sensor network developed by SCOUT will significantly improve Space Domain Awareness (SDA) and ensure responsible use of the space environment. The company is a Techstars, MassChallenge, and venture-backed startup with ongoing government contracts and commercial paid pilots. SCOUT holds the Established® 2021 Startup of the Year® title. For more information, visit www.scout.space.
