Spaceium

Spaceium is an early-stage company developing a network of automated in-space refueling and repair stations, which it calls service stations along the space superhighway. It aims to remove the fuel limit that forces spacecraft to retire or to trade payload for propellant. Its stations are meant to store propellant in orbit and transfer it to client spacecraft with a robotic arm. The company has said the same arm should handle cryogenic and non-cryogenic propellant transfer and repairs, serving vehicles from orbital tugs to lunar landers, with later stations in GEO and cislunar space.

Co-founders Ashi Dissanayake (CEO) and Reza Fetanat (CTO) are aerospace and mechanical engineers who met at the University of Ottawa, where as students they built a rocket that reached 30,000 feet. They started Spaceium in Ottawa, and Payload described it in 2024 as a Canadian startup. The company went through Y Combinator's Summer 2024 batch. The headquarters address on its official site is now in Long Beach, California. According to TechCrunch, in January 2025 Spaceium closed an oversubscribed US$6.3 million seed round led by Initialized Capital, and Payload reported that 15 other VC firms and angel investors took part. Before that it had raised just over US$500,000 to build its first prototype and had shown hardware on the ground at YC Demo Day.

Spaceium says it develops both main technologies in-house: proprietary propellant tanks designed to store fuel for years, and robotic arms for refueling. In 2024 the company described a cryogenic storage system able to hold multiple metric tons of propellant without boil-off, and an automated station launch planned for 2027 with some capacity already soft-allocated to customers. Those plans have not yet been flight-proven. It has announced partnerships with Australia's Space Machines Company on cryogenic refueling, with Aphelia on in-space recharging, and with The Exploration Company on in-space servicing.

The first hardware it flew is a precision robotic actuator, the joint drive for its refueling arm. Spaceium says the two founders designed, built, qualified and integrated it in five months. It launched on SpaceX's Transporter-15 rideshare in November 2025, hosted on a D-Orbit ION spacecraft. In February 2026 Spaceium announced that the actuator had achieved a verified rotation accuracy of 0.003 degrees in orbit, despite vacuum, radiation and thermal cycling. The company says that on an arm the size of those already used in space, this would mean less than a millimetre of movement at the tip, which is the precision needed to grapple a client spacecraft and align a fuel coupling. SpaceNews and Payload both covered the demonstration. Spaceium's next steps are in-space fuel-transfer demonstrations and then a full-scale refueling system.