A Quindar system dashboard. Photo: Quindar

Quindar, a small software company that has developed a spacecraft mission control platform, has raised $18 million in a new funding round to establish a classified mission operations center that will speed the time it takes for government and commercial customers to have operational control of space-based assets, the Denver-based company said on Wednesday.

The Series A round was led by Washington Harbour. The Series A raise included Booz Allen Hamilton’s venture unit, FUSE, FCVC and Y Combinator.

The classified mission operations center will be located in the Denver area and begin initial operations by late 2026, Nate Hamet, Quindar’s co-founder and CEO, told Defense Daily on Tuesday.

Quindar says that when the Space Force’s Space Systems Command needs a new operational ground system, it typically “takes more than a decade to field” whereas the company has the mission management infrastructure to integrate a common operating picture in “days” for its commercial and government customers.

“What we’ve seen is a major shift towards government-owned, commercially-operated satellites,” Hamet said. “This means that manufacturers are increasingly responsible for flying to their own vehicles, and often this is across multiple programs. And each of these programs for the government requires its own interface requirements. And so traditionally, every new interface or program and those ground systems can take years to field, up to a decade in a lot of cases. Our common operating picture solves that by using a modular open systems architecture. And so literally, a single version of Quindar Mission Management can integrate satellites from different manufacturers into one unified interface, or support multiple programs with all those different interfaces through the same mission control environment.”

The mission management software service provides customers with flight dynamics, mission planning to include command and control, payload routing, tasking and event management. These capabilities meet the routine needs of customers and include automatically fixing anomalies onboard the satellites, Hamet said.

Quindar currently has 40 employees and will continue to grow as the business scales up, he said. The Series A raise will aid hiring and also allow the company to increase integrations with commercial customers.

Quindar previously raised $10 million through two separate raises.

This story was first published by Defense Daily