Muon Space, a climate-focused satellite constellation company, has raised $10 million in Seed funding led by Costanoa Ventures with participation from Space Capital, Congruent VC, Ubiquity Ventures, South Park Commons, and Climactic VC.
Founded by a team from JPL, Skybox Imaging, Loft Orbital, Ball Aerospace, Apple and Google, who have led more than 30 successful remote sensing missions, Muon Space is building the Earth’s first scientific, software-defined, remote sensing, constellation platform and collaborating with organizations to deliver critical climate and Earth systems data. Early customers including Tomorrow.io and Google are partnering with Muon to develop new, mission-critical, geophysical datasets.
The recently released IPCC Sixth Assessment report emphasizes the importance of improved commitment to climate change mitigation and adaptation. Until now, scientific geophysical remote sensing has been limited to large, expensive, government-developed satellites that, while capable, are not scalable in numbers or measurement modalities. The improvements needed require a paradigm-change in precise, real-time information to drive informed decision making from local to global levels.
According to the company, commercial smallsat constellations have grown explosively over the last decade. They offer a scalable, more cost effective compliment to the large government systems. However existing commercial constellations are not capable of the precise, scientific geophysical measurements needed for climate change applications. Organizations lacking deep, in-house aerospace expertise are locked out of leveraging this crucial data to make better decisions.
Muon Space’s smallsats focus on dense, scientific-grade measurements of the atmosphere, ocean, and land processes related to climate. They offer the world’s first integrated remote sensing platform to bring these capabilities to organizations that lack the expertise or resources to develop them independently.
“Now that we’re experiencing the disruptive impacts of climate change, organizations across the world are asking what specific actions we should take,” said Jonny Dyer, CEO and co-founder of Muon Space. “Muon Space delivers the information they need to answer those questions.”
“Improving the world’s ability to respond to climate change is one of the most important global problems we face today,” said John Cowgill, Partner at Costanoa Ventures. “This is far and away the best team to rethink and create a purpose-built constellation to provide mission-as-a-service and expand who has access to crucial climate data.”
Muon Space is based in Mountain View, CA with satellite offices in Pasadena, California, and Boulder, Colorado. Founding team members include Jonny Dyer, Dan McCleese, Paul Day, Pascal Stang and Reuben Rohrschneider. The company states they ushering in a revolution in the ability to understand, model and predict a changing planet through the world’s most capable multi-modal satellite remote sensing systems.