London, UK - Sep 08, 2025 (UTC) - Space DOTS, a London-based spacetech startup, has announced the completion of a $1.5 million seed funding round led by Female Founders Fund. The company has now raised a total of $3.2 million in total funding to advance its mission of providing real-time orbital threat intelligence to space operators and manufacturers.
Founded in 2022 by CEO Bianca Cefalo, Space DOTS has developed a software platform called SKY-I for space tech manufacturers and operators to help them detect, interpret, and attribute natural and human-originated threats in orbit. The company addresses a critical gap in the space industry where nearly 15% of spacecraft experience some type of anomaly or failure due to manufacturers’ and operations’ misunderstanding of what space is actually like.
Other investors in the round include Feel Ventures and General Electric Company. This latest funding builds upon the company’s previous pre-seed round, which saw investment from notable investors including Boost VC, Sie Ventures, 7Percent Ventures, and Blue Wire Capital.
Cefalo, who brings decades of industry experience including work as a thermofluid dynamic analyst on the NASA Insight Mission to Mars and was a product manager at Airbus Defence and Space, working on telecommunication satellites, founded the company after becoming frustrated with corporate bureaucracy in the traditional space industry.
“Ground simulations can only model so much. The real environment is more complex and every orbital regime is different,” Cefalo said. “Space DOTS fixes this by generating proprietary in-orbit environmental data and fusing it with external sources into real-time attribution, now casting, and forecasting, giving spacecraft the intelligence edge to survive and succeed in contested space,” she added.
Cefalo described the fundraising process as “dating-to-marry” — or, in other words, brutal. She met her lead investors at Female Founders Fund by simply using the firm’s online cold outreach form. The CEO also leveraged her existing relationship with Sie Ventures for a warm introduction to the Female Founders Fund team.
The company’s technology platform combines hardware and software capabilities, differentiating it from competitors in the space weather monitoring sector. Space DOTS owns both its hardware and software; it’s focused on commercial, defense, and threat attribution, rather than just forecasting; and its software is also decentralized, which, Cefalo says, makes it “more resilient and scalable for future cislunar and multi-orbit operations“.
“We don’t see space weather players as zero-sum competitors. This is a field where collaboration strengthens the whole ecosystem — our intelligence can plug into and amplify other services, and vice versa,” Cefalo continued.
The seed funding will be used to expand the team across London and the United States while preparing the technology for upcoming space missions. Space DOT is already capturing data from its payload (object in space) and plans to get more from future launches.
Looking ahead, Cefalo envisions a future where space intelligence becomes democratized rather than confined to government agencies or large corporations. “The more we understand what’s happening out there, the better we can protect what matters down here: national infrastructure, civil safety, navigation, and defense,” she said. “That knowledge can’t stay locked inside agencies or corporations; it has to become shared understanding, radical access, and planetary belonging.”
The space industry is experiencing significant growth as commercial space activities expand, with competitors including Ensemble Space Labs and Mission Space operating in related sectors. The funding announcement comes at a time when space security and threat detection have become increasingly critical concerns for both commercial operators and defense organizations.
About Space DOTS
Space DOTS is a London-based spacetech startup founded in 2022 by CEO Bianca Cefalo and CTO James Sheppard-Alden. The company develops miniaturized in-situ testing solutions and environmental intelligence platforms for the space industry. Through its SKY-I software platform and proprietary hardware, Space DOTS provides real-time threat detection, attribution, and forecasting capabilities to help spacecraft operators navigate the complex orbital environment safely and successfully. The company serves customers across commercial, defense, and research sectors, with the mission to make space operations safer, smarter, and more commercially viable.
Source : Techcrunch
