Foundational, a space technology venture based in London, has announced its arrival with £8.2 million in pre-seed capital from a consortium of backers. The round included participation from Inflection, BACKED, Final Frontier, Adjacent and Type One Ventures. The company is building infrastructure that merges satellite-mounted retroreflectors, ground-based laser stations and software to generate and distribute high-precision positioning data for orbital applications.
Hira Virdee and Dave Gooding founded Foundational in 2025 to commercialise Satellite Laser Ranging (SLR), a technique for pinpointing the exact location of orbiting objects. The method works by transmitting laser pulses from Earth toward a retroreflector mounted on a satellite, then timing how long the light takes to bounce back. This approach delivers positioning accuracy down to millimetres.
The company's vertically integrated approach brings together three core elements: reflectors attached to satellites, automated ground-based laser firing systems, and a data processing platform. This integration aims to transform SLR from a research tool into a scalable commercial offering. The underlying technology originated from Lumi Space, which Virdee established in 2018 with backing from the European Space Agency and the UK Space Agency. Foundational was created to transition these systems from the laboratory into real-world deployment.
The company already works with operators of low Earth orbit satellite constellations, the European Space Agency, UK government bodies, aerospace firms, research organisations and commercial space technology developers. As the population of satellites and orbital debris continues to grow, operators increasingly require precise data about object locations and trajectory changes. SLR-generated information supports space traffic management, backup navigation systems and Earth observation work.
Satellite Laser Ranging is the gold standard, and is one of the most precise measurement tools humanity has built, capable of pinpointing a satellite to within millimetres, but until now it's been too costly and too complex to use at scale. By bringing the hardware, ground network and data platform together under one roof, we're rebuilding a critical layer of space infrastructure for the commercial era.
Hira Virdee, CEO and co-founder of Foundational
Foundational intends to deploy the new capital toward expanding its network of ground stations, taking manufacturing of its space-based hardware in-house, ramping up production of retroreflectors and enhancing its data platform. The long-term vision involves constructing a worldwide ground network capable of supplying positioning intelligence to satellite operators, insurance firms and government agencies.
Source: Tech.eu
