Spacium aims to create a “space highway” with refueling stations where spaceships can dock, refill, and continue their journey
Spacium Inc. has raised $6.3 million in seed funding in over four weeks to build a network of in-space refueling and repair stations for spacecrafts, enabling longer missions, larger payloads, and farther travel, the startup announced on Thursday.
Co-founders Ashi Dissanayake and Reza Fetanat are aerospace and mechanical engineers who have designed rocket engines, developed recovery systems, and managed payload integrations.
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Given their enormous experience in the field, they identified the lack of refueling options as a major challenge for long-distance space missions such as a trip to Mars.
Currently, spacecrafts carry all their fuel upfront, and after the mission, the remnants become space debris. Spacium aims to create a “space highway” with refueling stations where spaceships can dock, refill, and continue their journey.
Dissanayake and Fetanat first met in the University of Ottawa, and bonded over their mutual space obsession, teaming up for research projects. They started off in a tiny Ottawa apartment, and since then have moved to a proper office setup, gone through the Y Combinator accelerator program, and announced an oversubscribed $6.3 million seed round led by Initialized Capital.
Other investors include Y Combinator, Zeno Partners, Mergus Ventures, Olive Tree Capital, crosscourt.vc, Gaingels, Calm Ventures, and Alumni Ventures.
Spacium boasts of relentless innovation, and fast-moving execution, using cutting-edge technology to create solutions that transform space travel into a continuously evolving frontier, fulfilling commitments to meet the demands of the growing space economy.
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However, Spacium is not the only company working on space refueling. Competitors like OrbitFab and Astroscale are doing the same— particularly, OrbitFab has the experience as the first startup to supply water to the International Space Station. In 2023, Japanese aerospace company Astroscale won a $25.5 million U.S. Space Force contract to build a refueling vehicle.
However, Dissanayake believes Spacium has a competitive advantage over these companies. “We have actually developed a very unique system where we can store the fuel for longer periods of time, which was actually not done before,” she said, though she gave no further details. She also said she hopes one day, she would be able to take a trip to space, look out into the abyss, “and then actually see our stations from where we are.”