London's Foundational exits stealth with EUR 9.6M for satellite tracking
Tags Startups · Hardware
Foundational, a London-based SpaceTech startup, emerged from stealth with EUR 9.6 million (GBP 8.2 million) in pre-seed funding from Inflection, BACKED, Final Frontier, Adjacent and Type One Ventures. Founded in 2025 by Hira Virdee and Dave Gooding, the company builds infrastructure for precise positioning data for satellite applications spanning navigation, Earth observation, surveying, maritime and aviation. It builds on laser-ranging technology originally developed at Lumi Space, which Virdee founded in 2018 with support from the European Space Agency and UK Space Agency. The capital will expand its ground-station network, vertically integrate space-hardware manufacturing and scale retroreflector production.
Technical significance
Millimetre-level tracking of satellites and debris addresses a growing operational risk as orbital traffic increases, and laser ranging is a proven technique being commercialized. Vertical integration of retroreflector manufacturing suggests the company sees hardware supply as a bottleneck to scaling ground-station coverage.