COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo., – Citra Space Corp, a space technology company developing space object identification (SOI) capabilities, today announced a $15 million Series A financing led by Washington Harbour Partners, with participation from Industrious Ventures, Reliable Properties, and existing investors including Scout VC, Squadra Ventures, Alumni Ventures, and Flex Capital. The funding will be used to support development and deployment of Citra’s technology among commercial and government partners.
Founded in 2024 by former U.S. Space Force and Air Force officers with experience in space domain awareness and orbital warfare, Citra is developing technology to improve how object identity is established and maintained. The team has direct experience from mission environments where object identity is often uncertain, and decisions must be made with incomplete information.
“Operators today can see more objects in orbit than ever before, but understanding what those objects are and what they’re doing is still a major challenge. The real problem is understanding the capabilities, behavioral patterns, and intent of on-orbit systems. The U.S. Space Force has built a strong foundation for space domain awareness, and this funding allows us to accelerate delivering working products that help operators get more out of that data,” said Tom “Pumper” Nichols, CEO and co-founder of Citra.
There are currently over 35,000 objects orbiting Earth for both civil and national security missions. Capabilities for tracking these objects have significantly improved, yet for roughly 10,000 of them, operators still lack context about what they are – an identification gap. Even for known objects, understanding their intent, behavior, and potential threat remains a separate and largely unsolved challenge – a characterization gap. Addressing both requires information from both space- and ground-based data sources. Citra’s technology and mission aim to solve this challenge.
“Characterization is one of the least developed pieces of space domain awareness,” said Mina Faltas, Founder and Chief Investment Officer at Washington Harbour Partners. “Washington Harbour Partners is proud to invest in Citra’s thoughtful, data-driven approach to a problem that has real operational consequences and expand our leadership in supporting organizations helping the nation expand our space superiority. By understanding what objects in space are, and how they behave – and why – Citra is bringing mission-critical knowledge to operators.”
The company’s approach merges multiple independent data sources to create persistent “fingerprints” of objects over time. By integrating different observation types into a single view, Citra provides operators with a more consistent and defensible basis for identifying and characterizing object activity on-orbit. Based in Colorado Springs, the company is developing technology for both government and commercial space operators.
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