Array Labs.

Array Labs designs, builds, and operates radar satellites that fly in formation. Instead of one large spacecraft carrying one large radar, the company flies clusters of small satellites designed for mass production, imaging the same patch of ground from multiple angles at once. The output is native 3D imagery, a direct measurement of the Earth's shape rather than photographs draped over an old terrain model.

Radar earns its keep where cameras fail. It sees at night and through cloud cover, which matters when the customer is a planner who cannot wait for a clear day. Array Labs is based in Silicon Valley. Its work has drawn support from DARPA, the Office of Naval Research, SOCOM, and the U.S. Navy, alongside investment from Y Combinator and In-Q-Tel.

What they're building

The stack has three layers. The bottom layer is turnkey radar sensors built for mass production, on the bet that radar satellites should be manufactured like products instead of commissioned like ships. Above that sit the multistatic clusters, distributed groups of those satellites imaging cooperatively to deliver native 3D imaging and real-time moving-target indication at a fraction of the cost of a single large aperture.

At the top sits the product most people will touch: digital elevation models of the Earth at up to 10-centimeter resolution. Today's global terrain data is coarse and years stale. A current, fine-grained model of the planet's surface is useful to anyone who plans against the physical world, militaries first and then everyone else.

Why we backed the founders and team

This is the kind of company we exist to back. Multistatic radar from small satellites means solving formation flying and precision timing, and synchronizing spacecraft that move at orbital speed. Those problems do not yield to a pivot or a clever launch announcement. The work is RF hardware, orbital mechanics, and manufacturing, and most of it will never demo well.

We also like what the architecture implies. Clusters of cheap, modular satellites improve the way fleets do, unit by unit and launch by launch. Each added spacecraft compounds the value of the ones already flying. If Array Labs gets the swarm right, the prize is the base map for everything that moves on or above the Earth, refreshed in something close to real time.