Six ex-OneWeb engineers raise $2.5M for Quindar to revolutionize satellite mission management • TechCrunch

Sending spacecraft into orbit is never cheap, but many companies are plagued by the complex and costly demands of satellite mission management. Kinder wants to change that. The company, which just raised $2.5 million in seed funding, built a web app for end-to-end satellite operations. This helps customers get on track and get to market faster.

Quindar’s six co-founders met while working at British satellite communications company OneWeb and helped develop the satellite operations platform. There, they saw what Quindar CEO Nate Hamet called “red flags”: large amounts of human capital being spent on mission management and engineers buying and selling products that were cumbersome to integrate and scale. I was doing

“No one has created this streamlined solution and simplified a very complex workflow, so we had to integrate a bespoke product and create what we believe is the best solution. It didn’t,” Hamet said in a recent interview with TechCrunch. “Instead, we are essentially building the core foundation and baseline as a single service.”

The Denver-based but remote-first company graduated from Y Combinator last year. Quindar has his six co-founders, all with technical backgrounds, which allowed them to build their core product in months instead of years. The company’s seed round was oversubscribed before YC’s demo day, Hamet said.

Co-founders include Matt Regan, Head of Operations. Dave Lawrence, Head of Strategy. Sunny Bhagavathula, Head of Product. Shaishaf Parekh, Information Security Officer. Head of Engineering Zach Meza. The seed round includes funding from Y Combinator, FCVC, Soma Capital and Liquid 2 Ventures.

Quindar’s value proposition goes beyond its web app to facilitate mission management. Hamet says companies can skip hiring software developers and engineers and use the cost savings—up to a third of the cost of traditional mission management solutions, according to Hamet—for other parts of the business. You can also.

Image credit: Kindall (opens in new window)

The number and scope of solutions that Quindar hopes to offer is ambitious. What Quindar calls “mission management as a service,” its software platform helps startups design missions, test satellites, integrate with ground stations, and operate spacecraft through their orbital lifecycle. help. It’s about delivering what Hamet called a “forever commitment.” “It’s for the life of your mission five to ten years.”

Quindar is already working with customers, some on a pilot basis. Currently, the company is focused on working with startups that don’t yet have assets in space, but Hamet said it also intends to work with companies that have satellites in orbit. Customers with existing satellites can also use a slice of Quindar’s platform for certain features such as flight dynamics, reducing the risk of migrating their software to an entirely new platform.

Quindar’s is currently hiring for Frontend Engineer, Site Reliability Engineer, and Test Engineer positions. Looking ahead, Quindar also plans to extend its services to government and enterprise customers.

The ultimate goal, according to Hamet, is for Quindar to “host all the software.” […] It’s similar to how AWS revolutionized hosting servers as a service. We do it for the aerospace community. “

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