On a clear spring evening in Michigan, the stars aligned — just not in the way Upfront Ventures partner Nick Kim expected.
He’d just led a $9.5 million seed round for OurSky, a software platform for space observational data, and was eager to see what its telescope partner PlaneWave Instruments could do.
But when they rolled out the telescopes that night at PlaneWave’s manufacturing facility, he was stuck waiting.
“It took them quite a long time to get the first image. I’m talking like, multiple hours. And these are the people who make the telescopes! They were using all this, like, off-the-shelf, open-source software that they kind of cobbled together,” Kim said in an interview with TechCrunch.
Kim wasn’t upset, though. He was excited. “This is why OurSky needed to exist, right? This is the problem,” he remembered thinking. “What a perfect match.”
It was such a good match that, now, OurSky and PlaneWave are merging to create a new company called Observable Space.
OurSky founder Dan Roelker and PlaneWave founder Richard Hedrick say this will make the telescopes easier to use. And they also believe the tighter integration will open up new markets – especially as they leverage their position as the only U.S.-based telescope manufacturer. They already count NASA, the U.S. Space Force, and Georgia State’s Center for High Angular Resolution Astronomy as customers.
“My dream was to integrate all the components on the telescope, even the parts we don’t sell, and then integrate the control of the telescope,” Hedrick said in an interview. “It was very obvious for us to be working together.”
Roelker, who was SpaceX’s VP of software engineering from 2015 to 2019, said telescope users have to deal with what he called a “mash of integration bullsh–.” PlaneWave’s vertical strategy combined with OurSky’s software will eliminate those headaches, he said.
Solving that integration problem is an opportunity for Observable Space to grow the market, Roelker said. (The platform OurSky has built will continue on in that name, and the telescopes will continue to be sold under the PlaneWave brand.)
That can involve a number of things, like letting users tap multiple telescopes at a single site — or even around the world — to mimic the capabilities of a much larger telescope, or sending communications to and from space via laser, all while lowering cost.
Squeezing more out of his high-quality telescopes sold Hedrick on the merger. It will make the tech more approachable and affordable for enthusiasts and institutions alike.
Hedrick said one of those institutions recently designed some one-meter telescopes and had them custom built by someone else. “And they were like, ‘God, if you had existed, we never would have done that,’” he said.
New business
As the cost to get to orbit shrinks, more companies are sending things to space, Roelker said. That means there is increased demand for the ability to locate and track objects orbiting the Earth, communicate with spacecraft, and enable defense and intelligence applications.
Observable Space can be a key player in that new economy, according to Mislav Tolusic, managing partner at dual-use venture fund Marlinspike, which has invested in Observable Space.
“Every day you’re relying on space,” Tolusic said in an interview. “If you take out GPS constellations, we’re in trouble economically. It’s a big, big, big deal. A lot of systems stop functioning. And guess what? The future is going to be even more dependent on that infrastructure.”
Tolusic praised PlaneWave’s quality, and noted Hedrick built up the company at a time when basically all telescope manufacturing is overseas – which he believes is an advantage.
“If you want to replicate that [in the U.S.], you have to go figure out how to make those fine lenses, how to make gimbals – and not just how to design them but how to spit them out by the thousands,” he said.
Jordan Noone, general partner at Embedded Ventures, explained his fund’s investment with a specific example of what OurSky and PlaneWave can do as a combined company.
Shortly before the merger, Noone was at Mount Wilson Observatory in Los Angeles for a demo of the companies’ products working together.
He told TechCrunch that the teams pulled an observation request from the queue on OurSky’s platform: a satellite operator had lost radio contact with its spacecraft. The OurSky and PlaneWave teams located it quickly.
What he described was a much smoother experience than Kim’s demo in Michigan, and served as proof in his mind that Observable Space was a good bet to make.
“Many of the world’s most valuable companies, like Apple, Nvidia – they’re hardware/software platform combos,” Noone said. “Companies that approach just one of those two can have a lot of inherent value, but the combination of both in today’s world is extremely powerful.”
Star Wars or Star Trek?
Observable Space has about 100 employees, with the manufacturing operations remaining in Michigan, some engineering happening in Los Angeles, California, and an observatory outside Washington, D.C.
It’s already revenue-generating, and the combined company has raised $11 million to date, including funding from In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s non-profit strategic investment arm.
Hedrick and Roelker said the two companies have fit together easily, since they were both focused on such different businesses and didn’t have massive back office operations.
“Going through the merger process itself was actually really valuable, because when you’re going through it, a lot of issues pop up,” Roelker said. “You actually get a really good sense of how you’re going to work together. And I think both Rick and I felt really good about that, because we actually went through some really hard things during the merger.”
When asked, the pair did not describe those “hard things,” and Hedrick instead quipped: “We had to decide on whether [the company] was going to be Star Wars or Star Trek.”
The answer?
“Battlestar Galactica,” Roelker said.
