Y Combinator grad Spacium has raised $6.3 million in an oversubscription for space refueling

Back in 2023, Ashi Dissanayake, co-founder of space fueling startup Spacium, was so stressed out that he stuck his feet inside the dryer, using the surface of a clothes dryer as a writing desk. His computer sat next to Tide Pods, and he was surrounded by disembodied robotic arms, working late into the night with co-founder Reza Fetanat. At the time, the couple were working in a small apartment in Ottawa.

Since then, they’ve moved through Y Combinator into an office with real desks, and today announced a $6.3 million round of funding led by Initialized Capital. The company is planning a demo mission of its product capabilities later this year, and Dissanayake said they have a “strong pipeline of customers.”

The two co-founders bonded over their mutual space obsessions and teamed up for research projects at the University of Ottawa. “We were building the rockets, the rocket structures, the propulsion system, as well as the parachutes that would bring the rocket back,” he said, adding that they would put samples on the rockets, shoot them up to 30,000 feet and then send them up. data are returned to Canadian laboratories.

While working on the research, Dissanayake and Fetanat realized that the “biggest bottleneck” in the industry was the lack of refueling options in space. Currently, a spacecraft must be equipped with all the fuel needed for a mission. “And after the mission is over, the spacecraft is basically space junk,” he said.

For longer missions or deep space missions, such as colonizing Mars, companies need access to space fuel. “Our big mission would be to build a space superhighway, where we have many refueling stations where a spacecraft can stop, fill up and continue on its way,” he said.

Spacium is not the only company with this dream: Orbit Fab is also working on refueling in space and started a few years ago. In addition, Japanese aerospace company Astroscale won a $25.5 million contract with the US Space Force to build a refueling vehicle.

But Dissanayake is confident they have a competitive edge. “We’ve actually developed a very unique system where we can store fuel for a longer period of time, which hasn’t really been done before,” he declined to elaborate.

Dissanayake has a long way to go, but he hopes to one day travel into space, look into the abyss and “then see our stations from where we actually are.”