Karman+ digs up $20M to build an asteroid-mining autonomous spacecraft

Investors on looking out to startups that work at the boundaries of technology, are increasingly throwing their nets in non -chartered area, sometimes literally and figuratively. In one of the latest examples, called a startup Karman+ With ambitions to build autonomous spacecraft that can travel to asteroids and then they can have mines for materials now $ 20 million in a seed round that will use it to get themselves to the next phase of hardware and software development.

The first target of Karman+is very there. It is intended to build a ship that may be able to travel to asteroids that may be possible for millions of kilometers away, they, extremely water from that material (called Regolith) and then travel back to the orbit of the earth to that water Use to refuel spaces and the propulsion for aging satellites to extend their lives.

Later it sees opportunities to contribute to further work to extract rare metals and other materials from asteroids and to contribute to the development of a wider ecosystem for the production of space manufacturing, to compensate or supplement work on earth.

It sounds like the stuff of Science Fiction (and it is, because Astroid Mining was a central theme in the Nebula Award book 2013 called “2312”).

But the team believes that with the progress in autonomous technology, space exploration and the own work of Karman+so far, spacecraft builds up with ready-made components, the team is closer to achieving the goal than you might think .

Karman+ believes that missions can be carried out for $ 10 million or less, compared to the $ 1 billion spent on missions to explore asteroids so far. And that the potential market for refueling billions of dollars a year per year can be worth a single figure.

The team is currently striving for its first launch in 2027.

Denver, Colorado established Karman+ has carrots in the Netherlands through co-founder and CEO Teun van den. It is because of that euro connection that Karman+ willing investors have found to feed his own journey.

London-based plural and Antwerp-based Kolibrie leads this seed round, with a deep technically targeted HCVC (Paris-Development), Kevin Mahaffey (lookout), united Angels and Van den Droerts along.

Karman+ is named after the Karman lineA concept of where the atmosphere of the earth ends and “space” starts. That is also a suitable metaphor for how Van den Dries approached the idea to start the company in the first place with co-founder Daynan Crull.

The two worked together in the previous company of Van den, a starting data of real estate data called Geophy that was bought For $ 290 million in 2022. After the acquisition, Van den Dries said that he was starting to review his career priorities.

He describes himself as ‘a science fiction nerd’ who studied space technology at the university but never worked in the field. Instead, he had built Saas companies for the past 20 years.

“Two years ago I was at a bending point,” he remembered. “I can play the SaaS optimization game for another five years, and the company will probably be a lot bigger and more valuable. Or I could spend time and energy on something that I think will have a much greater impact. “

Work together with Crull, a data scientist by training who is now the mission architect for Karman+, Van den Ries’s attention focused on space.

“I wanted something that was invested,” he said about the space market. That shut out merger, which he also considered. Startups that work on merger technology have collectively collected more than $ 5 billion in financing, per Dealroom facts.

Mijnbouw -Sasteroids is a new limit, but also represented potential cost efficiency, he said, because when an organization wants to do something in space, it has to launch all components of the earth, and that is very expensive.

“The beauty of asteroids is that they are in the right plane,” he said about their job. “It is the easiest, cheapest, fastest place to get resources, especially in comparison with the moon, and actually also in comparison with the launch of everything from the earth. So the unlocking is there if you can bid [material] At attractive prices. You can start building a flywheel with which you can do all kinds of things that we simply cannot do at all. ”

It is not the only one trying this: Astroforge is another startup of the asteroid mining. But this is all clearly easier said than done. There are different variables that must stand in line to reach the first phase of Karman+route map.

The spacecraft of the startup still has to be completed, let alone tested. Although the Karman+ Strikers believe that they can yield the costs of up to around $ 10 million, so far only a handful of turning has been investigated by spacecraft. This by teams from NASA and once through a Japanese team and at major costs: more than $ 1 billion a single NASA mission.

Also the asteroids, around the sun, move goals yourself and – unless you are Count against expectations – They are nowhere near the earth. This NASA -page Follows the nearest approaches of these rocks, which vary in size and can be as large as buildings, and it records distances of the earth between hundreds of thousands of kilometers and millions of kilometers.

Then there are the problems of the satellites themselves. The starting point of the extraction of Karman+is that it can be used to refuel, but in reality they do not all use hydrogen and oxygen (solar and batteries are also used). Refueling itself is not a fully solved problem and it seems that there are Other approaches In the game.

And Karman+ has another, slightly more everyday obstacle: it will have to raise more money to launch closer.

That is not something that Karman+ or his investors are currently considering, which means that the ambitions are step by step.

“I was very skeptical in this conversation, and one thing I discovered was that the founders also approached this very skeptically,” said Sten Tamkivi, a partner in plural. Skepticism acts as a control and Tamkivi believes that it will help the team to stay realistic as they progress. That gave him, he said, the confidence to impose money on this (literally) distant idea.

‘I think you see much more Yolo In the software world, “he added. “People assume that hey, everything is built and so you just continue to plow and you will find out what the problems are later. The space boys, they actually make detailed plans. There are many things you can judge, dig and get opinions from third parties. “