Cindy Chin, CEO and founder of Planetary Systems AI, presents during Startup Space 2025. Photo: Access Intelligence

The annual Startup Space entrepreneur pitch contest showcases emerging space and satellite technology to an audience of investors during SATShow Week. Competitors’ technologies and innovations have pushed the boundaries of the field. Last year, Phemotron Systems won the competition, and previous winners include TrustPoint and Vyoma.

Now, in the contest’s 10th iteration, carefully selected finalists from four continents will vie for a grand prize that includes guaranteed investor meetings and business development assistance.

The 2026 competition will be held March 24 at the Unveiled Theater in the Exhibit Hall during SATShow Week. This year’s competitors include SatEnlight, Mithril Technologies, BULL, Esper Satellite Imagery, GoKnown, Satlyt, OrbitArch, Planetary Utilities, Ocean Solution Technology, and Space Solar.

BULL Co. — Yasuhito Uto, CEO

BULL envisions a future where interplanetary travel is commonplace. The Japanese company aims to make the space industry more sustainable by preventing the generation of space junk. Its solution is the Post Mission Disposal, a device installed on satellites that coats them with a thin-film membrane when their mission ends. The film creates drag, slowing the spacecraft, reducing orbital lifetime and preventing the dispersal of space debris. Last March, Japan’s J-Startup public-private partnership program selected BULL for its fifth cohort, a sign of recognition by the Japanese government. In November, the company completed its seed round of funding.

Yasuhito Uto founded BULL after space startup ALE divested its debris management division to BULL in 2022. With this February marking five years since he entered the space industry with ALE, he is pitching his company at Startup Space.

Esper Satellite Imagery — Shoaib Iqbal, CEO and Co-Founder

Esper specializes in hyperspectral mapping. Using its near-infrared Earth observation satellites, its images combine hundreds of color bands, revealing details on the planet’s surface invisible to standard RGB cameras. The technology is applicable in fields from agriculture to mining to defense. Last March, Esper raised $3.1 million in its seed round. In August, it launched OTR-2, its hyperspectral camera into orbit on a Dhruva Space satellite platform.

Esper CEO Shoaib Iqbal founded the company in 2021 while studying space science at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. In February of this year, Iqbal won the Collective Continuum pitch competition for Muslim-led businesses in Qatar; he will now pitch Esper at Startup Space.

GoKnown — Connie Erlanger, Co-Founder and CEO

Cybersecurity firm GoKnown descends from the merger of Marketcore.com and RubixIO, which earned renown in logistic analytics and decentralized computing respectively. Today, the company develops KNOWN, a time-sequenced distributed ledger designed to allow decentralized, secure computing able to handle large volumes of data. It has also developed a platform for data compute and storage in Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) called KNETIC for Space, and an alternative PNT solution. In August, the firm was accepted into the University of Central Florida’s NSF I-Corps Aerospace and Aviation Cohort, funded by the National Science Foundation.

Connie Erlanger founded GoKnown in 2018. Her background is in finance; her resume features positions at Chase, Bear Stearns, and Morgan Guaranty Bank. She will present GoKnown at Startup Space in March.

Mithril Technologies — Scarlett Koller, CEO

Mithril Technologies is working to develop the next generation of satellite antennas for Geostationary Orbit (GEO) and radio frequency (RF) instruments. Its flagship product is advertised as a breakthrough in radio frequency (RF) reflectors. Mithril’s satellite antennas employ electrostatically-activated mesh reflectors, enabling satellites to reconfigure and switch roles while in orbit. Its technology, it says, can improve responsiveness and resilience for American space assets, particularly for those in GEO.

After emerging from MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory of 2023, Mithril Technologies is beginning to earn recognition. The company was named to the 2026 cohort for the NATO defense innovation accelerator DIANA. And in October, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) named Mithril’s product as awardable in its Expedited Research Implementation Series (ERIS), qualifying it for acquisition by the U.S. government.

Mithril CEO Scarlett Koller previously worked as an engineer at SpaceX and NASA, before co-founding Mithril out of MIT’s Aerospace Materials and Structures Lab. She will be presenting her company at Startup Space.

Ocean Solution Technology Co. — Lennon Suga, Director of Overseas Business Development

Facing threats to its fishing industry, Japanese companies are working to build smarter fisheries. Ocean Solution Technology, based in Nagasaki, Japan, is contributing with Triton’s Spear: a software solution leveraging Earth Observation data to control marine resources more efficiently and sustainability. Marketing to fishermen, governments, and researchers, its technology is designed to automatically log catch reports, save labor, and enable the precise use of fishery resources. The company has partnered with leading Japanese telecommunications company KDDI Corporation, and Japanese space agency JAXA.

Lennon Suga, Ocean’s director of overseas business development, will present the company at Startup Space.

OrbitArch — Naman Chawla, Founder and CEO

As more satellites are launched into space and reach the end of their operational lifetimes, the risk of Earth’s orbit becoming choked with high-velocity debris increases. Collisions between space debris can cause fragments to multiply, which threatens to make entire regions of orbit inoperable. OrbitArch’s solution is a quantum radar system that it says can track orbital objects as small as 1 centimeter wide. Its neural networks predict collisions weeks in advance and autonomously executes avoidance maneuvers. Last year, the company was a Top 30 semifinalist at the Eureka business model competition in Dubai.

20-year-old Naman Chawla founded OrbitArch in 2024 as an undergraduate at the Birla Institute of Technology and Science in Dubai. In October, he spoke at the United Nations International Telecommunication Union Space Sustainability Forum. He will be representing OrbitArch at Startup Space.

Planetary Utilities — Johannes Gross, CEO

The team behind Planetary Utilities believes that the potential of modern tools is being squandered by poor interfaces and workflows. Through consulting services in digital transformation, adoption, integration, and deployment, it offers to rectify this problem. Planetary Utilities, based in the Los Angeles area, recently relocated from Altadena to Monrovia after the Eaton fire ravaged its headquarters. The company develops Starforge, a language-based interface built to make space missions accessible to smaller teams by unifying siloed tools and information. The company cites engineers at leading organizations like The Aerospace Corporation, Airbus, and SAIC as customers. The firm was recently selected alongside nine others for the Seraphim Accelerator to receive seed capital.

Company CEO Johannes Gross holds a doctorate from the University of Stuttgart and spent seven years as a technologist and engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He will be presenting Planetary Utilities at Startup Space.

SatEnlight — Matteo Vismara, Founder and CEO

SatEnlight is developing new technologies for inter-satellite optical communication. The company says that its solution enables decoding information from multiple lasers simultaneously, through digital multiplexing of data transmitted through optical channels. The implications, it says, are increased data rates and transmission security. This month, the company closed a 995,000 euro ($1.2 million) funding round and multiple prize grants.

SatEnlight CEO Mattero Vismara founded the company from a laboratory at the University of Milan, where he earned a master’s degree in physics. He has also studied at MIT and Cambridge. He will present SatEnlight at Startup Space in March.

Satlyt — Rama Afullo, Founder and CEO

Satlyt, a developer of space-based data centers in Low-Earth Orbit (LEO), sits at a new frontier of satellite technology. The Silicon Valley startup endeavors to create a decentralized space computing platform, widely accessible to individual developers and large companies. Since its formal launch in 2024, it has earned grants from NASA, Google, Nvidia, and more. Recently, it received $25,000 in funding from the city of San Jose’s AI startup incentive program. Satlyt also recently signed an agreement to license DiskSat technology from The Aerospace Corporation to enable autonomous operations and in-orbit data processing.

Satlyt founder Rama Afullo has worked in managerial roles for Google and SpaceX. Previously, he was one of Tesla’s first three employees in Africa. He holds degrees in mechanical engineering and business management and dropped out of a space systems engineering graduate program to build his company. He will be presenting Satlyt at Startup Space.

Space Solar — Martin Soltau, Co-CEO

Space Solar’s vision is straight out of science fiction: solar energy collected in GEO and beamed down to Earth via RF waves. The company projects that in 12 years, its technology will provide round-the-clock power to meet rising electricity demand and accelerate achieving Net Zero. Innovations in manufacturing, rocket launches, and computing, they say, have made the solution safe and scalable. Space Solar’s plans are getting traction — in 2024, it signed a deal to collaborate with Transition Labs to provide Iceland’s Reykjavik Energy with electricity from a space-based solar power plant.

After a 24-year career in aerospace engineering, Martin Soltau co-founded Space Solar, which has been recognized as a leader in the United Kingdom’s energy sector. Representatives from the company have been recognized and invited to speak at clean energy symposiums around the world. The company won the Space Business Catalyst Award at World Space Business Week in Paris last year. Soltau will present Space Solar at Startup Space in March.