Hira Virdee is a physicist who has built his career around one question: exactly where are the objects in orbit? He read physics at the University of Oxford, then completed a master's and a PhD at University College London, where his doctoral research focused on tracking space debris and predicting where it will travel next.
In 2018 he founded Lumi Space in London to develop satellite laser ranging, with support from the European Space Agency and the UK Space Agency. Lumi Space concentrated on research and government projects, and the laser-ranging systems built there became the basis of his next company.
In 2025 Virdee cofounded Foundational with Dave Gooding to take that technology into commercial deployment, and he leads it as CEO. The company emerged from stealth in October 2026 with £8.2M in pre-seed funding from Inflection, BACKED, Final Frontier, Adjacent and Type One Ventures, which it describes as the largest pre-seed round raised by a European space technology company.