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Satellite radar tech startup Kapta Space raises $24M from Bill Gates-backed fund and defense investors

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Satellite radar tech startup Kapta Space raises $24M from Bill Gates-backed fund and defense investors

Kapta Space, a Seattle startup building lower-cost, steerable radar sensors for satellites, has raised $24 million in a Series A funding round to scale production and meet growing demand for defense intelligence contracts.

The investment brings total funding to $30 million, following an initial $5 million seed round led by MetaVC— a metamaterials-focused fund backed by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and former Microsoft executive Nathan Myhrvold. It also previously received a $1.8 million grant from the Department of Defense.

The deal highlights the ongoing momentum in the Pacific Northwest’s commercial space ecosystem, where a growing cluster of venture-backed startups is building hardware alongside major satellite operations like SpaceX’s Starlink facility in Redmond and Amazon’s Leo constellation program.

Founded in 2023 by CEO Milton Perque and Adam Bily, Kapta uses metamaterials for its proprietary Metamaterial Electronically Scanned Array (MESA) architecture. The tech provides high-resolution, geospatial imagery and ground-target tracking without the extreme cost, power demands, and manufacturing complexity of traditional systems.

Both founders bring deep local expertise to the hardware: Perque and Bily were previously engineering leaders at radar maker Echodyne. Perque’s background also includes stops at Metacept and Intellectual Ventures, while Bily served as an antenna engineer at Apple and satellite startup Astranis.

The fresh capital will help Kapta expand manufacturing, qualify its hardware for spaceflight, and prepare for initial orbital demonstration missions.

Kapta’s software-defined architecture aims to make persistent satellite tracking feasible at constellation scale, letting spacecraft rapidly steer beams to continuously detect and hold custody of moving targets across air, sea and land.


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