Foundational has emerged from stealth to automate and scale Satellite Laser Ranging (SLR), the technique that pins down the position of satellites and debris to millimetre precision. The London-based company launches with £8.2 million in pre-seed funding, the largest pre-seed round raised by any European space technology company to date.

As Low Earth Orbit grows more crowded, operators need to know exactly where objects are and how their trajectories are changing. ESA’s 2026 Space Environment Report tracked around 45,000 objects in orbit at the end of 2025, including an estimated 1.5 million pieces of debris between 1cm and 10cm, each large enough to destroy an operational satellite. At the same time, the UN has warned that the ageing geodetic infrastructure underpinning satellite positioning is “perilously close to collapse”.

Foundational is rebuilding that infrastructure for the commercial era. It brings the whole SLR system into one vertically integrated network: the retroreflectors mounted on satellites, the ground stations that track them, and Origin, the software platform that processes and delivers the data. The result is a station that is fully automated, weatherproof, and around 30x less expensive than legacy facilities, built to scale as a distributed network rather than as one-off scientific sites.

The network is already operational, tracking objects to millimetre-level precision from up to 2,000km, day and night, using eye-safe lasers. To put that in context, it is like spotting from London that a car in Edinburgh has rolled forward by the width of a pencil. Early customers are being onboarded through Origin and its API, and Foundational already supports missions across commercial constellations, the European Space Agency, UK government, aerospace manufacturers and research institutes.

“By automating and scaling Satellite Laser Ranging, Foundational helps operators identify collision risks, plan safer manoeuvres and make better use of their spacecraft. But the opportunity goes beyond tracking satellites: at scale, these measurements can help us build better models of atmospheric drag, re-entry and the wider environment around Earth, creating a new generation of commercial geodetic data products.”

Hira Virdee, co-founder and CEO of Foundational

Founded in 2025 by Hira Virdee and Dave Gooding, Foundational builds on laser-ranging technology developed at Lumi Space. The pre-seed round was backed by BACKED, Final Frontier, Adjacent, Type One Ventures and Inflection.