Startup True Anomaly snags $100 million for space security work

True Anomaly just scored a big chunk of change to continue developing its space security tech.

The Colorado-based startup announced on Tuesday (Dec. 12) that it raised $100 million in a "Series B" round of funding led by Riot Ventures.

The money "will be used for continued investment in people, products and services to further advance True Anomaly's national security space technology offerings at the intersection of hardware, software and AI," True Anomaly representatives said in an emailed statement on Tuesday.

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True Anomaly, which was founded in 2022, aims to help make space a safer and more sustainable environment for a wide range of stakeholders. The company also wants to help the United States retain its status as the world's preeminent space power, in the face of increasing competition with China.

"The company empowers the U.S. government, its allies, and partners as well as the commercial space industry to lead safe, resilient operations on orbit to secure life on Earth," True Anomaly wrote in a statement on Tuesday.

Though the company is young, it has already secured an impressive amount of funding through investments and contracts. For example, True Anomaly representatives announced in April that they had raised $30 million to date, including $17 million in "Series A" funding. (The Series A round comes just after the initial "seed capital." Series B, as its name suggests, comes after Series A.)

And, in September, the company revealed that it had won a $17.4 million Small Business Innovation Research contract from the U.S. Space Force. 

Under that award, True Anomaly will provide the Space Force with "a suite of Space Domain Awareness (SDA) applications that will leverage powerful analytics and scalable AI to support human-machine teaming for improved efficiency across the spectrum of SDA operations," True Anomaly representatives said in a Sept. 21 statement. "This will be delivered through True Anomaly's Mosaic software — an integrated operating system for every aspect of space domain awareness and security."  

True Anomaly also builds spacecraft — specifically, an autonomous vehicle called Jackal that's "designed for live and simulated rendezvous and proximity operations," according to the company's website.

The first two Jackals are scheduled to launch to Earth orbit next year, on SpaceX's Transporter-10 rideshare mission. That initial mission will test Jackal's various tracking and rendezvous systems. If all goes well, True Anomaly could eventually send thousands of satellites up, to help the U.S. military keep tabs on the many objects and goings-on in orbit, Wired magazine wrote earlier this year.