Kapta Space announced Wednesday it has closed a $24 million Series A round led by Washington Harbour Partners and co-led by Bison Ventures, bringing the Seattle-based startup's total funding to $30 million since its 2023 launch. The company, which develops metamaterial radar payloads for military satellites, has also secured multiple classified contracts for moving target indication, though it declined to name customers or disclose contract sizes.
The timing isn't accidental. The Space Force has been accelerating deployment of space-based tracking systems, awarding SpaceX a $4.16 billion contract for orbital moving target detection in May 2026 and distributing $615 million across three additional vendors in August 2026 through a nine-company pool dedicated to airborne target indication work. Kapta's founders appear intent on capturing a piece of that expanding market.
Milton Perque, the company's CEO, spent roughly six years as chief hardware engineer at Echodyne, a radar technology firm, before launching Kapta. His co-founder and CTO, Adam Bily, previously worked as an antenna engineer at Apple and later led the antenna team at satellite communications startup Astranis. Both bring deep technical credentials to a sector where heritage matters perhaps as much as innovation.
A Different Approach to Radar
What Kapta is selling differs from the traditional playbook. The startup's Metamaterial Electronically Scanned Array payloads promise moving target tracking and synthetic aperture imaging at lower cost and power consumption than conventional active electronically scanned arrays. The technology relies on software-defined, modular components designed to enable wide field coverage and rapid beam steering.
"The mission calls for persistent awareness, and that requires us to rethink how radar has to work at constellation scale," Perque said in the announcement.
Whether that rethinking translates to operational advantage remains to be demonstrated. Kapta plans to use the new capital to scale production for its classified contracts and qualify its payload for actual flight. Perque told industry publication Payload the company is executing two demonstration missions and expects to achieve flight heritage within roughly two to three years.
The company positions itself as a payload supplier rather than an end-to-end imagery provider, a distinction that separates it from commercial synthetic aperture radar operators like ICEYE, Capella Space and Umbra. That narrower focus could prove strategic. Building and operating full constellation systems requires capital Kapta doesn't yet have; selling payloads to government customers or prime contractors offers a more direct path to revenue.
Metamaterials Draw Investor Interest
The Series A attracted a mix of defense-focused and technology-specific investors. Washington Harbour Partners, which ranked among the top six investors in a recent national security venture capital assessment, led the round. Bison Ventures co-led, while MetaVC—a metamaterials-focused firm backed by Bill Gates and Nathan Myhrvold—participated after leading Kapta's $5 million seed round announced in February 2025.
"Kapta's MESA architecture changes that equation with a modular, highly manufacturable approach to electronically steerable radar," said Mina Faltas, founder and CEO of Washington Harbour Partners.
Ben Hemani, founding partner at Bison Ventures, emphasized scale. The technology enables "persistent sensing at a scale traditional architectures simply weren't built to support," he said.
MetaVC, which raised a $62 million fund in 2023, has been methodically building a portfolio around metamaterials applications in sensing and communications. Kapta represents a bet that the technology can move beyond laboratory curiosity to deployed military hardware.
The company also received a $1.8 million Direct to Phase II Small Business Innovation Research award from the Department of Defense in 2023, an early validation that helped derisk the technology before private capital arrived in larger amounts.
For Kapta, the immediate challenge is execution. Classified contracts offer revenue visibility but demand performance on government timelines. Scaling manufacturing while maintaining the cost and power advantages the company claims will require navigating supply chains, talent acquisition and the inevitable engineering compromises that accompany moving from prototype to production.
Perque framed the funding as enabling the company "to advance our technology, expand manufacturing, and work with strategic partners to bring that capability through flight qualification." Translation: the hard part starts now.
