WASHINGTON — Array Labs, a Silicon Valley startup developing radar-based Earth observation satellites, announced Jan. 5 it raised $20 million in a Series A round as it pushes to bring lower-cost synthetic aperture radar into commercial and national security markets.
The financing was led by Catapult Ventures, with participation from Washington Harbour Partners, Kompas VC and a group of new and existing investors that includes Y Combinator, Maiora Capital, Animal Capital, Aera VC, Cultivation Capital and Clearance Ventures. The round brings Array’s total funding to $35 million.
Array is betting that radar hardware long treated as bespoke and expensive can be produced at scale using manufacturing techniques drawn from consumer electronics and telecommunications. Chief executive and co-founder Andrew Peterson said the company’s approach is designed to break a cost curve that has limited the deployment of space-based radar systems beyond a narrow set of government customers.
The company plans to “build radar that can be produced at scale, at commercial price points, without sacrificing capability,” Peterson said.
Synthetic aperture radar, or SAR, is valued by defense and intelligence agencies because it can collect imagery day or night and through clouds, smoke and other obscurants that degrade optical sensors.
Array’s architecture departs from traditional single-satellite SAR systems. The company plans to launch clusters of small satellites that fly in coordinated formations and image the same area from multiple angles. By combining those data sets, Array says it can generate three-dimensional terrain and object models with faster revisit times than existing approaches.
The startup is positioning itself as both a data supplier and a hardware provider. It operates three business lines: radar payloads sold to satellite manufacturers and defense primes, sovereign satellite systems for customers that want to own and operate their own spacecraft, and data products derived from Array’s own constellation. The company said it has won roughly a half dozen U.S. defense and intelligence contracts over the past two years.
Array said it has signed multi-year agreements tied to its first radar cluster with companies in mining, infrastructure and embodied artificial intelligence, a category that includes robots and autonomous systems that rely on high-fidelity environmental data.
Array launched two demonstration satellites in 2024 to validate its distributed radar concept and plans a second demonstration mission in 2026. The Series A funding will be used to expand engineering and production capacity, complete flight qualification of its radar panels and prepare for its first operational cluster, the company said.
The startup has also moved to embed its technology within the broader geospatial and defense ecosystem. Last year, Array announced a partnership with Raytheon Space & Airborne Systems and Umbra Space to develop advanced 3D Earth observation products, including a radar-based offering known as Site3D.
Array also signed an agreement with Maxar Intelligence, now operating as Vantor, to integrate Array’s radar-derived 3D data into Vantor’s global terrain products.
