Array Labs has closed a $20 million Series A funding round to expand its constellation of space-based radar satellites, bringing advanced monitoring capabilities to commercial and government customers.
The round was led by Catapult Ventures, with participation from Washington Harbour Partners, Kompas VC, as well as new and existing backers including Y Combinator, Maiora Ventures, Animal Capital, SuperOrganism, Aera VC,Gaingels, Hexagon, Cultivation Capital, and Clearance Ventures.
The investment brings Array’s total funding to $35 million since completing the Y Combinator accelerator program, following a $5 million seed round in 2022 and a $10 million round in 2024. The company is using a manufacturing approach borrowed from consumer electronics and telecommunications to produce radar systems at a fraction of traditional costs, with the aim to disrupt an industry that founder and CEO Andrew Peterson describes as being dominated by expensive, custom-built systems from legacy defense contractors.
Evolution of Array Labs: Building Radar Satellites with Consumer Tech
Array’s core technology is a radar architecture designed for mass production rather than bespoke manufacturing. The company claims its instruments can deliver up to 100 times the power of legacy systems at roughly 1% of the cost and packaged in formats that are compatible with various satellite platforms. This approach has allowed Array to pivot from its original business model and expand into three distinct product lines that serve different market segments.
First, the company now sells radar payloads as standalone instruments to satellite bus providers and defense contractors looking for high-power and low-cost systems that can be mass-produced and integrated with existing platforms.
It also offers sovereign satellite systems that are fully integrated spacecraft and dedicated clusters for customers who want to own and operate their own assets for wide-area intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance. The third business line, with the help of this funding, will focus on data products that are able to provide 3D imagery and analytics from Array’s owned and operated constellation to commercial and civil government customers.
Additionally, the Series A funding will be deployed across other several strategic priorities. Array plans to scale its engineering, product, and go-to-market teams while expanding production capacity to meet growing demand for its radar panels.
The company will also complete flight qualification testing and work toward launching its formation-flying radar satellite cluster, which would represent a significant technical achievement in the space-based radar sector.
Real-World Impact Across Industries
Array’s business evolution reflects a strategic shift based on market demand. The company initially set out to launch clusters of small satellites that would work cooperatively to create a real-time 3D map of Earth.
However, as Array developed its core technology, the company discovered that the radar instruments themselves were attracting significant customer interest independent of the broader constellation vision. The company restructured to meet that demand, transforming from a vertically integrated remote-sensing data provider into what they now call a radar-first platform business.
“The radar satellite industry today looks like space launch before SpaceX: dominated by legacy defense contractors building bespoke, expensive systems one at a time,” Andrew Peterson, co-founder and CEO of Array Labs said in a statement. “We’ve assembled a team from the most innovative technology companies in Silicon Valley to do something different: build radar that can be produced at scale, at commercial price points, without sacrificing capability.”
The shift appears to be paying off. Over the last two years, the company has secured several U.S. awards across the Air Force, Space Force, Navy, Army, U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM), and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to “advance the state of the art across high-power antenna architectures, high-bandwidth communications links, 3D reconstruction algorithms, and more.”
The competitive landscape for space-based radar has intensified in recent years, with companies like Capella Space, ICEYE, and Umbra all building their own synthetic aperture radar constellations.
The radar satellite industry is also attracting attention because synthetic aperture radar can image Earth’s surface regardless of weather conditions or time of day, unlike optical satellites that require clear skies and daylight. This capability makes radar particularly valuable for applications requiring consistent monitoring, such as tracking maritime traffic, monitoring infrastructure changes, supporting disaster response, and conducting military surveillance.
So far, the challenge has been bringing down costs enough to make radar satellite data commercially viable at scale.
And Array Labs has positioned itself differently by emphasizing manufacturing efficiency and modular radar payloads that can be sold to other satellite operators, rather than focusing exclusively on building its own closed constellation. This approach gives the company multiple revenue streams and reduces its dependence on any single business model.
Array has also formed strategic partnerships to accelerate its product development. The company has worked with Maxar Technologies on 3D operational terrain products and collaborated with Umbra and Raytheon on 3D product rollouts. These partnerships suggest that Array is positioning itself as an enabling technology provider within the broader space imaging ecosystem rather than purely competing head-to-head with other radar satellite operators.
With fresh capital and an expanding customer base across both commercial and government sectors, Array Labs is betting that its consumer-focused approach will allow it to capture significant market share as demand for space-based radar continues to grow.
