London space technology company Foundational has emerged from stealth with £8.2M in pre-seed funding from Inflection, BACKED, Final Frontier, Adjacent and Type One Ventures.
Low Earth orbit is getting crowded. The European Space Agency counted around 45,000 tracked objects in orbit at the end of 2025, plus an estimated 1.5 million fragments between 1cm and 10cm across, any of which can destroy a working satellite. Avoiding collisions depends on knowing exactly where things are, and the most accurate tool for the job, satellite laser ranging, has stayed confined to a handful of expensive, manually operated scientific stations.
Foundational packages the whole technique as a commercial service. Satellites carry its retroreflectors, its automated ground stations fire laser pulses at them and time the return, and its Origin platform turns those measurements into positioning data delivered through an API. The company says its stations are weatherproof, fully automated and around 30 times cheaper than legacy facilities, and can range objects to millimetre precision at up to 2,000km, day or night. Satellite operators and governments use the data for collision avoidance, navigation and Earth observation.
CEO Hira Virdee and CTO Dave Gooding founded the company in 2025 to commercialise laser-ranging technology from Lumi Space, the research company Virdee started in 2018 with support from the European Space Agency and UK Space Agency. Foundational already supports missions for commercial satellite constellations, ESA, UK government departments, aerospace manufacturers and research institutes. Virdee calls laser ranging "one of the most precise measurement tools humanity has built", held back until now by cost and complexity.
The company describes the round as the largest pre-seed raised by a European space technology company. It will spend the money adding ground stations to its network, bringing manufacturing of its space hardware in house, scaling up retroreflector production and building out the Origin platform.
Sources