Mantis Space: Building the Power Grid for the Orbital Economy
Why we invested in Mantis Space's $10M round to build space's first power utility
Space isn’t just a government program anymore – it’s a $630B commercial economy on track to hit $1.8T by 2035, and the space-based infrastructure being deployed looks nothing like it did even five years ago. U.S. launches went from 29 in 2017 to over 180 in 2025, and tens of thousands of satellites are expected to join the already ~12K active satellites today by the end of the decade.
The composition of the space economy is changing fast. In 2025, Starcloud deployed the first GPU-class compute in orbit. Axiom Space seeks to launch data center nodes to the ISS. Google has published feasibility studies on space-based AI infrastructure at scale. Meanwhile, the cislunar economy is moving from concept to execution, as NASA’s Artemis program, China’s Chang’e series, and commercial landers from Intuitive Machines, Astrobotic, and ispace create real demand for persistent power, communications, and logistics infrastructure between Earth and the Moon. This is no longer a satellite economy. It’s an industrial one.
Every satellite in orbit runs on the same basic electrical architecture: solar panels and batteries. In low-earth orbit, satellites spend roughly a third of their time in Earth’s shadow. When they’re in eclipse, power generation stops, systems fall back on battery reserves, and performance degrades. Every asset in orbit is paying that tax.
Some operators have tried to work around it by choosing dawn-dusk sun-synchronous orbits that maximize solar exposure. But for missions that need location-specific coverage such as high-revisit imaging or regional compute, that orbital choice trades mission productivity for power. You get more energy, but less ability to do the job the satellite was designed for.
As workloads get more compute-intensive and more mission-critical, this penalty gets worse. More capability requires more power, and the cost of eclipse periods and suboptimal orbits keeps compounding. On the lunar surface, the constraint is even more stark: the 14-day lunar night makes continuous power existential for any sustained presence on the Moon.
We saw a structural opportunity here.
We are proud to announce our investment in Mantis Space, which has emerged from stealth with an oversubscribed seed round of more than $10 million led by Rule 1 Ventures, to solve exactly this problem.
We built Mantis Space through our venture studio alongside CEO Eric Truitt, a proven builder of mission-critical space enterprises who previously co-founded PredaSAR and NYSE-listed Terran Orbital (acquired by Lockheed Martin) and recently helped BlueHalo successfully exit to AeroVironment in a $4.5 billion transaction; Chairman and Chief Strategy Officer Rear Admiral Hugh Wyman Howard III, who served 32 years in Naval Special Warfare and joint special operations and served as Director of Operations for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency; and COO Jeremy Scheerer, who led defense and intelligence portfolios at MapLarge and Georgia Tech Research Institute, and managed billion-dollar U.S. Air Force global acquisition programs. Together, we gained conviction that the orbital economy needs a space-based power grid, and that this founding team is uniquely credentialed to build it.
Mantis is developing a constellation of spacecraft positioned in an orbit selected for near-constant solar exposure, designed to redirect captured energy to client satellites operating in eclipse. The core insight is simple: decouple power availability from orbital position. Instead of chasing sunlight, operators can place assets in the most productive orbits for their actual missions.
The economics are significant. Mantis projects that its architecture can improve the return on satellite systems by 2 to 3X, driven by higher mission utilization and longer operational lifetimes. For orbital data centers and persistent ISR platforms, where every minute of eclipse downtime is lost revenue or degraded intelligence, the case is even more direct.
We think about it this way: the terrestrial power industry was built on grids, not individual generators, and the orbital and cislunar economies will be no different: the data centers, manufacturing platforms, and persistent systems defining the next era of space all require shared energy infrastructure. Mantis is building that utility layer.
We’re excited to be on this journey with the Mantis Space team. If you want to learn more about what they’re building, reach out at mantis.space.