Bianca Cefalo grew so tired of the corporate space world that she found it easier to start her own space company and launch objects into orbit. Cefalo is the founder of Space DOTS, which launched in 2022 to detect space threats. She and her team have created a software platform called SKY-I for space tech manufacturers and operators to help them detect, interpret, and attribute natural and human-originated threats in orbit.
She has spent decades in the industry, working on projects that have put objects on the moon and launched satellites into orbit. She worked as a thermofluid dynamic analyst on the NASA Insight Mission to Mars and was a product manager at Airbus Defence and Space, working on telecommunication satellites. She found, however, that industry politics and corporate bureaucracy were bottlenecks to progress.
She recalled that every time she would pitch an idea to her last employer, she was met with resistance. The response was always the same: if it hasn’t flown already, we are not using it on our satellite. She was told to innovate, but the company refused to adopt anything unproven. She was hired to be an innovator inside a corporate giant, but in reality she was being told not to do too much. And in that, she rewrote the rules.
Cefalo said that nearly 15% of spacecraft experience some type of anomaly or failure due to manufacturers’ and operators’ misunderstanding of what space is actually like. Ground simulations can only model so much. The real environment is more complex and every orbital regime is different. For example, what might work in a low orbit will not necessarily work in deep space. Radiation alone can cause various mishaps that lead to spacecraft failure, while other accidents in space are dismissed as glitches or space weather because there is not enough data to explain what is actually happening.
Space DOTS fixes this by generating proprietary in-orbit environmental data and fusing it with external sources into real-time attribution, now casting, and forecasting. This gives spacecraft the intelligence edge to survive and succeed in contested space. Space DOTS is already capturing data from its payload in space and plans to get more from future launches.
The company announced a $1.5 million seed round led by Female Founders Fund. It has now raised a total of $3.2 million in funding. Cefalo described the fundraising process as dating-to-marry, or in other words, brutal. She met her lead investors at Female Founders Fund by simply using the firm’s online cold outreach form. She also asked her investors at Sie Ventures if they could make a warm introduction to the FFF team. As it turned out, both paths converged. Her application was picked up through the form, and Sie was able to connect her directly. That combination worked out.
Other investors in the round include Feel Ventures and General Electric Company. As Cefalo said, the space industry is going through a second revolution, especially as billionaires pour millions of dollars into commercializing space travel. Competitors include names like Ensemble Space Labs and Mission Space.
Cefalo said her company is different because Space DOTS owns both its hardware and software. It is focused on commercial, defense, and threat attribution, rather than just forecasting. Its software is also decentralized, which makes it more resilient and scalable for future cislunar and multi-orbit operations. She added that they do not see space weather players as zero-sum competitors. This is a field where collaboration strengthens the whole ecosystem. Their intelligence can plug into and amplify other services, and vice versa.
Cefalo said she will use the seed round to expand her team in London and the U.S. and prepare her technology for upcoming space missions. The future, for her, is one where access to space means shared knowledge rather than gated power. The more we understand what is happening out there, the better we can protect what matters down here: national infrastructure, civil safety, navigation, and defense. That knowledge cannot stay locked inside agencies or corporations; it has to become shared understanding, radical access, and planetary belonging.