Photo: Anduril

Anduril Industries on Wednesday said it has agreed to acquire ExoAnalytic Solutions, a small business that brings a global network of more than 400 consumer-grade telescopes for space domain awareness and software used across the space ecosystem for tracking and discriminating targets for missile defense.

Terms of the pending deal and the expected closing date were not disclosed.

ExoAnalytic, which is based in California, has about 130 employees and will more than double the employee count of Anduril’s space business, which stands at 120, Gokul Subramanian, senior vice president of engineering at Anduril, told reporters on Tuesday. The company will be absorbed into Anduril, he said.

ExoAnalytic’s headcount is the same as when it acquired United Kingdom-based 3S Northumbria in 2024 to strengthen its space situational awareness services. At that time, ExoAnalytic said it had more than 300 telescopes deployed worldwide.

In the space domain awareness market, ExoAnalytic applies software and analytics against the imagery obtained by the telescopes in high-altitude Earth orbits to autonomously monitor spacecraft, debris, anomalies and other events in space. The company also maintains a database of “billions of correlated observations” that is “expertly labeled with critical events, including detected maneuvers, stability changes, anomalies, and more,” ExoAnalytic says on its website.

Anduril is already involved in space domain awareness through the $100 million contract it won in November 2024 to provide its Lattice operating system to create a mesh network for ground-based sensors that track objects in space.

Highlighting the “increasingly congested, contested domain” of space, and the fact that the Space Force describes it as a “warfighting domain,” Subramanian said that “if you can’t see in space, you can’t fight in space.” The acquisition of ExoAnalytic is the “next step in that journey” to bolster Anduril’s ability to help the Defense Department secure space, he said.

Missile Defense Expertise

For missile defense, ExoAnalytic’s algorithms enable the tracking of missiles based on radar and optical sensor data to predict where a potential target is heading, and to enable “downstream discrimination processes to identify which of the tracked objects require interception,” the company says. The company’s algorithms also work autonomously to help missile interceptors discriminate between threat targets and harmless objects such as debris, fuel tanks and hardware.

“They’ve supported a number of U.S. and commercial customers, defense contractors in missile defense, and they are experts in digital signal processing, seeker theory, seeker design and estimation of targets, discriminating the hard body, discriminating the target from other things that might be in the environment,” Subramanian said.

Modeling and simulation is a third area of expertise of ExoAnalytic’s and an area the company has worked with Anduril, Subramanian said. The two companies are working “on a number of programs” and have been for several years, he said.

Both companies were built by engineers and are steeped in an engineering culture, making the combination a good fit, he said.

Anduril has two self-funded launches expected to occur this year, Hydronaut, which features the company’s sensors and compute payloads on Argo Space Corp.’s highly-maneuverable Navigator spacecraft, and Lectronimo, which uses an Apex-supplied bus with Anduril’s mission data processing and infrared imaging capabilities.

ExoAnalytic will contribute to the orbital and related ground-based capabilities of the two missions, Subramanian said.

ExoAnalytic is a merchant supplier of its services and this model will continue, he said.

“We’re also going to invest in next generation products that start to become less commercial in nature and more fit for purpose, and you’ll hear more from us on that in the future,” Subramanian said. Later during the virtual roundtable, he said, “We give no advantages to anyone, including ourselves. There are going to be things that we’re going to want to do product development on in an exclusive way, with them bringing their expertise into the Anduril product development. Those things may be exclusive, or we might turn around to be a merchant supplier of those things too, as we do with other parts of our business.”

This story was first published by Defense Daily