LeoLabs has appointed Tony Frazier as the company’s new Chief Executive Officer (CEO). He will lead LeoLabs as the firm scales to become a critical mission partner for combined military space operations and next generation space safety systems.
Tony’s wealth of experience driving innovation at the intersection of commercial space and national security will help LeoLabs further accelerate its growth and solidify its position as an industry leader. Most recently, as the Executive Vice President and General Manager of Public Sector Earth Intelligence at Maxar Technologies, Tony led a $1 billion business that supported missions across the U.S. Government and more than 60 international customers. During his tenure at Maxar, GeoEye, and DigitalGlobe, Tony became a trusted mission partner, won billions of dollars in new contract awards, and incubated two new businesses that were scaled above $100 million.
Space is increasingly congested and contested. In 2020, there were approximately 2,500 operational satellites in LEO Forecasts indicate this number could exceed 12,000 by the end of 2024 and upwards of 70,000 by 2030. While much of this growth has been driven by the commercial sector, many nations are making strategic investments in space. For example, China has reported that it intends to build a constellation of 26,000 satellites. This exponential growth of activity in space has created a need for a new class of safety and security solutions.
LeoLabs experienced strong momentum over the past year. It was recently selected by the U.S. Space Force to participate in the Space Systems Command’s SDA TAP Lab Accelerator where it is demonstrating how its AI-powered solutions can be applied to Space Battle Management. Additionally, LeoLabs is supporting international allies as they establish their military space operations. The company was also selected to provide a commercial foundation for the U.S. Department of Commerce’s historic civil space traffic coordination system.
Dan Ceperley co-founded LeoLabs in 2016 while at SRI International. As CEO, Dan led the development of the company’s proprietary radar technology, completing its first radar site in 2017 and expanding the network globally to include 10 radars in under six years. Under his leadership, LeoLabs built the world’s largest commercially owned catalog of objects and activities in LEO and developed the fastest and most comprehensive data analytics platform for space operations. It has won multiple multi-million-dollar contracts and raised more than $120 million in venture capital funding.
“After my experience at Maxar, I was looking for a company bringing commercial innovation to a critical national security mission,” said Tony. “LeoLabs is delivering incredible capabilities in the emerging markets of space situational awareness and space domain awareness. LeoLabs was the first company to detect a secondary object released by a Russian satellite in November and persistently tracked China’s spaceplane for over 200 days between 2022 and 2023, detecting several maneuvers, deployments, and docking activities. At Maxar, we leveraged the unique capabilities of our constellation, advances in computing, and geospatial analytics expertise to become the industry leader in Earth Intelligence. LeoLabs has built the right capabilities at the right time to become a critical mission partner for U.S., allied, and commercial space operators. I’m excited to join LeoLabs as CEO to build on its market momentum and scale its growth.”
“One of my proudest accomplishments is to see the technology we developed at LeoLabs used to impact customer missions,” said Dan. “The number of satellites and space threats is growing at an unprecedented rate. Tony is going to take the great capabilities and customer relationships we pioneered and scale them to become an indispensable source of information for the global space industry. I’m thrilled to get back to my engineering roots and support him by delivering the technology that will power this transition. We have new sensor hardware in the works, new AI-powered analytics, software integrations, and cutting-edge R&D that will make 2024 an exciting year.”
“It is terrific to see how Dan and the LeoLabs team have taken a nascent technology developed at SRI under funding from the U.S. Department of Defense and the National Science Foundation and grown it from a prototype to a product lockstep with the growth of the commercial space business,” said LeoLabs Board Chairman Manish Kothari. “The Board and I are grateful for Dan’s contributions and are excited for what is to come under Tony’s leadership.”