WASHINGTON — U.S. defense and intelligence contractor Booz Allen Hamilton announced on July 11 that its corporate venture capital arm, Booz Allen Ventures, has made a strategic investment in Quindar, an early-stage commercial space technology company.
The investment is intended to support Quindar’s platform for automating satellite operations: satellite owners use Quindar’s app to analyze, test and operate their constellations with minimal human intervention.
Booz Allen launched its corporate ventures division in 2022 and has a fund of about $100 million under management.
Founded in Denver in 2022 by former OneWeb engineers, Quindar aims to “democratize space” by providing IT infrastructure for satellites.
Chris Bogdan, executive vice president at Booz Allen and leader of the company’s space business, said the seed-stage investment in Quindar was due to “confidence in Quindar’s solution based on the critical needs of our Department of Defense customers.” Bogdan noted that federal customers are increasingly looking to industry for help in accelerating innovation and integrating technologies to modernize legacy satellite and ground systems.
Quindar CEO and co-founder Nate Hammett said the company is “excited to partner with Booz Allen Hamilton to advance our AI-powered space management solutions.”
Travis Bales, managing director at Booz Allen Ventures, highlighted the growing need for mission domain expansion and integration in the space sector. “For the last five years or so, the stack supporting satellite operations has been separated into different disciplines: launch, payloads, operations,” Bales added. “Quindar’s stack will enable us to manage the future of space support operations for a variety of partners and payloads from one holistic view.”
Booz Allen Ventures has previously invested in early-stage companies developing dual-use technologies, including Latent AI, Synthetaic, Reveal Technology, Credo AI, Hidden Level, Shift5, Hidden Layer, Second Front and Albedo.
Quindar announced in January that it had closed a $6 million funding round, an extension of a $2.5 million seed round it had closed a year earlier.
