Investors on the lookout for startups working at the frontiers of technology are casting their nets ever further into unchartered territory, sometimes literally as well as figuratively. In one of the latest examples, a startup called Karman+ with ambitions to build autonomous spacecraft that can travel to asteroids and then mine them for materials has now raised $20 million in a seed round that it will be using to get itself to its next stage of hardware and software development. 

Karman+’s initial target is very out-there. It aims to build a vessel that can travel to asteroids potentially millions of miles away, mine them, extract water from that material (called regolith), and then travel back to the earth’s orbit to use that water to refuel space tugs and the propulsion for ageing satellites to extend their life.

Later, it sees opportunities to contribute to further work to extract rare metals and other materials from asteroids, and contribute to the development of a wider space manufacturing ecosystem, to offset or complement work on Earth.

It sounds like the stuff of science fiction (and it is, as astroid mining was a central theme in the 2013 Nebula Award winning book called “2312”).

But the team believes that with advances in autonomous technology, space exploration, and Karman+’s own work so far building its spacecraft with off-the-shelf components, the team is closer to realising its goal than you might think.

Karman+ believes that missions can be run for $10 million or less, compared to the $1 billion that’s been spent on missions to explore asteroids up to now. And that the potential market for refuelling could be worth single digit billions of dollars per year per year.

The team is currently aiming for its first launch in 2027.

Denver, Colorado-based Karman+ has roots in The Netherlands by way of co-founder and CEO Teun van den Dries. It’s through that Euro connection that Karman+ has found willing investors to fuel its own journey.

London-based Plural and Antwerp-based Hummingbird are leading this seed round, with deep tech-focused HCVC (Paris-founded), Kevin Mahaffey (Lookout), un-named angels and Van den Dries himself participating. 

Karman+ was named after the Karman Line, a concept of where Earth’s atmosphere ends and “space” begins. That is also a fitting metaphor for how Van den Dries approached the idea of starting the company in the first place with co-founder Daynan Crull. 

The two worked together at Van den Dries’ previous enterprise, a real estate data startup called GeoPhy that was acquired for $290 million in 2022. After the acquisition, Van den Dries said he started to reassess his career priorities.

He describes himself as being “a science fiction nerd” who studied aerospace engineering in college but never worked in the field. Instead, he’d been building SaaS companies for the past 20 years. 

“Two years ago, I was at an inflection point,” he recalled. “I can do the SaaS optimization play for another five years, and the business will probably be a lot bigger and more valuable. Or, I could spend time and energy on something that I think will have a much bigger impact.”

Teaming up with Crull, a data scientist by training who is now the mission architect for Karman+, Van den Dries’ attention turned to space.

“I wanted something that was under invested,” he said of the space market. That ruled out fusion, which he also considered. Startups working on fusion technology have collectively raised more than $5 billion in funding, per Dealroom data.

Mining asteroids is a new frontier, but also represented potential cost efficiency, he said, since typically when an organization wants to do something in space, it needs to launch all the components from Earth, and that is very costly.

“The beauty of asteroids is that they’re at the right plane,” he said of their orbit. “It is the easiest, cheapest, fastest place to get resources, certainly compared to the moon, and actually also compared to launching it all from Earth. So the unlock there is if you are able to provide [material] at attractive prices. You can start to build a flywheel that allows you to to do all sorts of things that right now we just cannot do at all.”

It’s not the only one trying to this: AstroForge is another asteroid mining startup. But this is all obviously easier said than done. There are several variables that would need to line up to achieve the first phase of Karman+’s roadmap. 

The startup’s spacecraft has yet to be completed, let alone tested. Although the Karman+ founders believe they can bring costs down to around $10 million, so far asteroids have only been probed by spacecraft a handful of times before. This by teams from NASA and once by a Japanese team and at great cost: more than $1 billion a single NASA mission. 

Also, the asteroids, orbiting the sun, themselves are moving targets and — unless you’re counting against the odds — they are nowhere near earth. This NASA page tracks the closest approaches of these rocks, which range in size and can be as large as buildings, and it notes distances from Earth of between hundreds of thousands of miles, and millions of miles.

Then there is the issues of the satellites themselves. The premise of Karman+’s extraction is that it can be used to refuel, but in reality not all of them use hydrogen and oxygen (solar and batteries are also used). Refuelling itself is not a fully-solved problem and it seems that there are other approaches in play.

And Karman+ has another, slightly more mundane hurdle: it will need to raise more money to closer to launch. 

That is not something that Karman+ or its investors are currently considering, taking its ambitions one step at a time. 

“I went into this conversation very skeptically, and one thing I found out was that the founders have approached this very skeptically, too,” said Sten Tamkivi, a partner at Plural. Skepticism acts as a control, and Tamkivi believes it will help the team remain realistic as they progress. That gave him, he said, the confidence to put money down on this (literally) far-out idea.

“I think you see way more YOLO in the software world,” he added. “People assume that, hey, everything has been built and so you just plow through and you’ll figure out what the problems are later. The space guys, they actually make detailed plans. There’s a lot of stuff that you can review, dig in and get third party opinions.”