Kapta Space, a Seattle company that builds radar payloads for satellites, announced a $24m Series A on 9 October 2026. Washington Harbour Partners led the round and Bison Ventures co-led it.
MetaVC also took part, along with new and existing investors including MYDA Capital, Entrada Ventures, Aurelia Foundry and Fitz Gate Ventures. The company did not disclose a valuation.
The round brings Kapta's total funding to $30m. It follows several classified contracts for moving target indication (MTI) that the company won earlier in 2026. Kapta has not named the customers or the value of the contracts.
“The mission calls for persistent awareness, and that requires us to rethink how radar has to work at constellation scale. Traditional architectures are cost-prohibitive and were never designed for the scale these missions now demand.”Milton Perque, Founder and CEO, Kapta Space
What Kapta Space does
Kapta designs electronically steered radar for spacecraft in low Earth orbit. Its modular, software-defined architecture is called MESA, short for Metamaterial Electronically Scanned Array. The company says it delivers advanced radar performance at much lower cost, power use and manufacturing complexity than the active electronically scanned arrays (AESA) used in conventional systems.
The payloads are meant for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance: finding moving targets on land, at sea and in the air and keeping track of them, plus wide-area tracking and high-resolution synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging. Payload reported that Kapta expects the radar to be able to follow missiles in the mid-course phase of flight, and that a scaled-down version could give satellite operators SAR in a smaller package.
Milton Perque, formerly of Echodyne, and Adam Bily, formerly of Apple and Astranis, founded the company in 2023, according to its 2025 seed announcement. Perque is chief executive and Bily is chief technology officer.
Who invested
Washington Harbour Partners is a Washington DC private investment firm that focuses on national security, defence, cybersecurity and enterprise technology. Its founder and chief executive, Mina Faltas, said traditional AESA payloads had for decades been too expensive and complex to deploy at the scale MTI missions require. Faltas said the firm expects Kapta to become a core supplier to US and allied space programmes.
Ben Hemani, founding partner at Bison Ventures, said the team was rethinking a critical system from first principles by making space radar cheaper and easier to manufacture.
What the money is for
Kapta will use the money to scale production for its MTI contracts, qualify its payload for flight, expand manufacturing capacity and prepare its first orbital demonstration with strategic partners.
Perque told Payload that the company is working on two demonstration missions and expects to gain flight heritage within 24 to 36 months. He said the high cost of space radar has so far prevented the US from deploying the hundreds or thousands of sensors an MTI system needs.
The funding so far
Kapta came out of stealth in February 2025 with a $5m seed round led by MetaVC Partners, with Entrada Ventures and Blue Collective taking part. At the time it said it had won a $1.8m Direct to Phase II SBIR award in 2023 to build its steerable antennas for space-based radar.
Company website: kaptaspace.com