The Catalyx leadership team with co-founder Rifath Shaarook, center. Photo: Catalyx

New startup Catalyx Space has raised a $5.4 million seed funding round to accelerate its technology development to build space infrastructure including satellite buses and reentry platforms.  

Catalyx Space has moved quickly since Rifath Shaarook co-founded the company in India just last year. It has already launched its first spacecraft, which launched last year with the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) to demonstrate its satellite separation system and other subsystems, carrying two customer payloads, Shaarook tells Via Satellite. 

The company is now preparing to launch its second spacecraft either in December or January, which will host a number of sensors. It also plans to launch a 100 kg spacecraft next year as well. 

Shaarook has been building spacecraft from a young age — he garnered media attention at age 18 for building a tiny, 64-gram satellite that won a NASA challenge. He later ran an academic research lab in India where he built and launched eight satellites into orbit. 

Catalyx wants to make starting a business in space as easy as launching a software business — so space application developers do not have to manage spacecraft, ground operations, launch, Shaarook said. 

“I started the company last year primarily because of frustration during my PhD with how slow it is to deploy new systems in space and bring them back,” Shaarook said. “The mission is to build the complete backend infrastructure layers so the customers can focus on the application.” 

“Ultimately, for space to become sustainable like any other industry, we want to make sure it’s easier than ever to host applications in space, ranging from manufacturing to communications,” he added. 

To that end, Catalyx is developing a satellite bus called Cosmotron, and the Rex reentry capsule. The capsule has use cases like hypersonic testing for defense, and pharmaceutical and biotech material science. 

After raising a $1.7 million pre-seed round in January, Catalyx built a version of its capsule which it tested earlier this year, dropping the capsule from an airplane. 

Catalyx is taking the vertically integrated route, building its systems in-house. It is currently constructing a 25,000 square foot facility in Ahmedabad, India, to bring development, test, and design in-house under the same roof, Shaarook said. 

The company is based in San Francisco, and Shaarook relocated to the U.S. last year. It has a rapidly growing team of 30 people with plans to grow to 45 or 50 by 2026. 

Outlander VC led the funding round announced this week. Junior partner AJ Smith says that Shaarook has been able to accomplish flight heritage and a pace of execution by spending less than its $1.7 million in pre-seed, which could take other companies $10 million to accomplish. 

“A lot of space companies and founders claim to have a ‘move fast and break things’ mentality, but very few of them are actually operating at the type of cadence with the type of quality that Rifath and Catalyx are,” Smith told Via Satellite.

Outlander VC is an early-stage general investment fund, focused almost exclusively on pre-seed and some seed funding. 

Smith sees a large opportunity for Catalyx to accelerate the pace of innovation for the space economy and allow businesses, governments, and educational institutions to put assets in space more easily. 

“Space is incredibly fragmented, and that’s the real bottleneck. What they’re doing differently — it’s not just a bus, it’s not just a capsule — it’s the full infrastructure to operate, iterate and return from orbit. That’s a really big white space,” Smith said. 

The funding round also included participation from Arka Venture Labs, Lex Reddy, KDX Management LLC, Together Fund, Higher Life Ventures, Nivesha Ventures, Prana Tech Ventures, Bria, HF0 Residency, and Techstars.