Karman+

Karman+ is an asteroid-mining startup headquartered in Denver, Colorado, with roots in the Netherlands. It was founded by CEO Teun van den Dries and Daynan Crull. Its plan is to send low-cost, autonomous spacecraft to near-Earth asteroids, extract regolith and the water bound in it, and bring the material back to Earth orbit. The first market is water and propellant to refuel space tugs and extend the life of ageing satellites; later markets include raw materials for in-orbit manufacturing and space-based solar power. The company says it works with 'radical transparency', publishing its master plan, roadmap and progress updates, and building its spacecraft mainly from off-the-shelf components to keep each mission at about 10 million dollars or less.

Its master plan names three core capabilities it wants to own: autonomous, low-cost deep-space asteroid missions; mining in zero gravity, meaning safe excavation of regolith at scale; and in-situ processing and refining at the asteroid. Other parts of the value chain, such as launch, component supply and last-mile delivery, it expects to buy from partners. Its stated objective for the first mission is to rendezvous with a near-Earth asteroid and show regolith capture at kilogram scale. Its spacecraft design uses touch-and-go surface contact and solar electric propulsion.

The fleet has two vehicles. Corvus weighs 700 kg with about 10 kW of power and is sized to return 1,000-5,000 kg of water to customers in Earth orbit. Roc is ten times larger, at 7,000 kg and about 100 kW, and is meant to return whole asteroids of up to 100,000 kg. Mission 1 will use Corvus to visit 99942 Apophis, a roughly 340 m S-type asteroid that passes within about 32,000 km of Earth on 13 April 2029. Launch is planned for mid-2028 with rendezvous in 2030, after the original early-2027 launch slipped because of a propulsion supplier delay. At Apophis the spacecraft will rehearse the key steps of a mining mission: autonomous deep-space navigation, proximity operations around a small irregular body, and deploying tests to make contact with the surface. NASA's OSIRIS-APEX and the ESA/JAXA RAMSES mission will be observing Apophis at the same time. In 2025 the company built a series of full-scale engineering models to iterate its design.

In September 2026 Karman+ released Prospector, the internal tool it uses to choose asteroid targets and size spacecraft, as open-source software under the Apache-2.0 licence on GitHub. It also publishes an asteroid leaderboard that ranks targets by accessibility. In February 2025 the company raised a 20 million dollar seed round led by Plural (London) and Hummingbird (Antwerp), with HCVC, Lookout founder Kevin Mahaffey, angels and van den Dries also taking part. LinkedIn lists the company in the 11-50 employee band.