Sometimes a Moonshot Is Literally a Moonshot
Lunar Outpost’s vision is to enable an extended human presence in space while positively impacting Earth.
Promus Ventures is excited to be part of the $12M Seed Round announced by Lunar Outpost this week. We have known Justin and the team at Lunar Outpost for quite a while, and believe that they are building a company with multiple paths that will allow them to create value for their customers and partners.
Creating Value in Space and on Earth
Lunar Outpost has been focused on creating value in space since the company was founded. The founders have been thinking about how we can access in-situ space resources for many years, while simultaneously being incredibly scrappy and focused on building a sustainable business.
Early on, the Lunar Outpost team worked on a novel environmental sensing solution that was planned to be an integral part of lunar habitat safety, making sure that astronauts could manage their health and the technical challenges of living and working in the harsh lunar environment. The Lunar Outpost sensor’s ability to detect and manage exposure to lunar dust and other particulates and contaminants was very differentiated and hard to replicate.
At Promus Ventures, we fund companies working on challenging deep tech problems, where solving difficult hardware and software problems creates real moats that competitors will need to solve for. At the same time we like to see teams figure out how to capture value early with their products, which can often be hard for early-stage deep tech companies.
Lunar Outpost have demonstrated that they are ahead of many of their peers in the new space ecosystem from this perspective, as they took the technology and product they had developed for this lunar habitat use-case and turned it into a market-leading environmental sensing IoT solution here on Earth.
The company offers a hardware product called Canary with a connectivity, monitoring and compliance software product that sits on top of the Canary sensor network. Multiple customers are using the Lunar Outpost Canary product for everything from ESG monitoring and environmental compliance in the resource extraction sector to municipal and government air quality tracking, and we expect this side of their business to continue to scale.
But What About Those Moonshots?
In parallel, the team at Lunar Outpost have not lost track of their vision around space, and have kept iterating on their product roadmap for space and the emerging lunar/cis-lunar economy. The company has demonstrated an ability to attract commercial customers for their lunar rover-as-a-service business, with two fully funded rover missions already scheduled and more exciting announcements coming soon.
There are multiple drivers behind the renewed interest in lunar exploration and presence. NASA and other civilian agencies are leading the way with their commitment to investing significant amounts of capital to jumpstart a permanent human presence on the moon, and we are confident that private and commercial investment will follow closely after.
As the lunar ecosystem continues to mature, we believe Lunar Outpost will be well-positioned as a leading commercial provider of lunar infrastructure and transportation services, and look forward to working with Justin and the entire Lunar Outpost team to help them realize this vision.
Promus Ventures invests in early-stage deep tech startups solving complex problems to advance everyday lives across the world. Some of Promus Ventures’ other leading portfolio investments include Rocket Lab (Nasdaq: RKLB), Whoop, AngelList, Mapbox, ICEYE, Bellabeat, Swift Navigation, Cobalt Robotics, Behavox, Spire (NYSE: SPIR), Isotropic Systems, Halter, Diligent Robotics, Safehub, Biocogniv and numerous others. Past exits include Kensho, Gauss Surgical, Figure Eight, Enview, June, Represent, Circulate, and HealthMode among others.
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