Foundational, a London-based space startup, emerged from stealth on October 1 with £8.2 million in pre-seed funding to automate and scale Satellite Laser Ranging (SLR), a technique used to pin down the position of satellites and debris to millimetre precision. The company says it is the largest pre-seed round raised by any European space technology company to date.
SLR works by firing eye-safe laser pulses from a ground station at a retroreflector mounted on a satellite and measuring how long the light takes to return. Foundational has built a vertically integrated network combining these retroreflectors, automated ground stations, and a software platform called Origin that processes and delivers the tracking data. The company says its stations are fully automated, weatherproof, and roughly 30 times less expensive to run than legacy SLR facilities, and that its network already tracks objects to millimetre-level precision from as far as 2,000 kilometers, day and night.
"By automating and scaling Satellite Laser Ranging, Foundational helps operators identify collision risks, plan safer manoeuvres and make better use of their spacecraft," said Hira Virdee, co-founder and CEO of Foundational. Virdee added that at scale, the measurements can also help build better models of atmospheric drag, re-entry and the wider orbital environment, creating what she called "a new generation of commercial geodetic data products."
Foundational was founded in 2025 by Virdee and Dave Gooding, building on laser-ranging technology developed at Lumi Space. The pre-seed round was backed by BACKED, Final Frontier, Adjacent, Type One Ventures and Inflection. The company says its network already supports missions for commercial satellite constellations, the European Space Agency, the UK government, aerospace manufacturers and research institutes.
Foundational cites the European Space Agency's 2026 Space Environment Report, which 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 in size, each large enough to destroy an operational satellite. The company argues that scaling SLR is needed as low Earth orbit grows more crowded and as the UN has warned that the aging geodetic infrastructure underpinning satellite positioning is "perilously close to collapse."