GOLDEN, CO – MAY 23, 2022 – Lunar Outpost, a global leader in commercial planetary mobility, announced a $12 million seed funding round today. The closed round was led by Explorer 1 Fund with participation from Promus Ventures, Space Capital, Type 1 Ventures and Cathexis Ventures. The capital will be used to launch a new class of autonomous lunar rovers, deploy Lunar Outpost’s robotic technologies in additional environments, and invest in new technologies to improve its existing platforms. Explorer 1 Fund Principal Daniel Kleinman and Promus Ventures Partner Gareth Keane also joined Lunar Outpost’s Board of Directors.
With the promise of decades of safe travel to the Moon and the rise of commercialized space, society looks to expand both human and robotic operations throughout the solar system, igniting a global demand for an extended lunar presence. Countries are racing to set up lunar bases to continue the critical research and leveraging of the Moon’s resources to establish a new paradigm of value generation in space. Lunar Outpost is helping establish this paradigm by developing and implementing technology that enables a sustainable presence in cislunar space – evidenced by their status as the only company with two fully funded commercial rover missions to the Moon.
Lunar Outpost’s technologies have both Earth and space applications, providing “mobility as a service” on the Moon to companies, researchers, governments, and universities. Its modular autonomous rovers and service-based business model drastically lower the cost to explore space, build interplanetary infrastructure, and harvest the vast resources of space. Current offerings include:
- Mobile Autonomous Prospecting Platform (MAPP): The first commercial lunar prospector, to be debuted in the United States, with industry-leading payload support and mobility capabilities that will be demonstrated on two commercial missions to the Moon. In mid-2023, the MAPP rover will participate in Nokia’s LTE/4G NASA Tipping Point program with Intuitive Machines to build, integrate and test the first-ever LTE/4G network on the surface of the Moon. MAPP was also selected by NASA’s PRISM program for the Lunar Vertex Mission to the Moon in partnership with the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) to explore the mysterious Reiner Gamma region of the lunar surface in early 2024.
- Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment (MOXIE): Humanity’s first-ever successful demonstration of how space resources can be used to fuel further exploration in space and sustain human life on another planet. MOXIE contributed to the first demonstration of space resource utilization on another planet by creating oxygen from the atmosphere of Mars.
- Canary Industrial-Grade Environmental Monitors: Continuous smart IoT devices customizable for PM 2.5, tVOC, O3, NO2, CH4, CO, meteorological data and much more. Lunar Outpost is currently producing and operating thousands of Canary devices that have collected over 35 billion data points through its web-based Canary dashboard.
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