Back in 2023, Ashi Dissanayake, cofounder of in-space fueling startup Spacium, was so bootstrapped she used the surface of her clothes dryer as a desk, sticking her legs inside the drying machine. Her computer was perched beside Tide Pods and she was surrounded by disembodied robotic arms, working late into the night with her cofounder, Reza Fetanat. Back then, the pair worked out of a tiny Ottawa apartment.
Since then, they’ve moved to an office with real desks, gone through Y Combinator, and, today, announced an oversubscribed $6.3 million seed round led by Initialized Capital. The company is planning a demo mission of their product capabilities later this year, and Dissanayake said they have a “strong pipeline of customers.”
The two cofounders bonded at University of Ottawa over their mutual space obsession and teamed up for research projects. “We were building the rockets, rocket structures, propulsion system, as well as the parachutes that would bring the rocket back,” she said, adding they would put samples in the rockets, shoot them up as high as 30,000 feet, and then send the data back to Canadian labs.
As they worked on research, Dissanayake and Fetanat realized that “the biggest bottleneck” in the industry was the lack of refueling options in space. Right now, a spacecraft has to be equipped with all the fuel it needs for a mission. “And after the mission ends, the spacecraft basically becomes space debris,” she said.
For longer missions or deep space missions — like, say, colonizing Mars — companies will need to have access to fuel in space. “Our big mission would be to build the space super highway, where we have multiple refueling stations where a spacecraft can come dock, refill, and go about their way,” she said.
Spacium is not the only company with this dream: Orbit Fab is also working on in-space refueling, and has a several year head start. Additionally, Japanese aerospace company Astroscale won a $25.5 million U.S. Space Force contract to build a refueling vehicle.
But Dissanayake feels confident they have a competitive advantage. “We have actually developed a very unique system where we can store the fuel for longer periods of time, which was actually not done before,” she said, declining to give further details.
Dissanayake has a long way to go, but she hopes one day she can take a trip up to space, look out into the abyss, “and then actually see our stations from where we are.”
