Starpath Robotics

Starpath Robotics is a space infrastructure company headquartered at 13030 Cerise Ave. in Hawthorne, California, led by CEO and co-founder Saurav Shroff. It develops and manufactures technologies intended to support permanent human settlement on the Moon and Mars, starting with power and propellant. Its two programs are Starmine, an end-to-end system for producing rocket propellant from lunar resources, and Starlight, a line of mass-produced space solar panels.

Starmine is built around fleets of autonomous rovers. Starpath's rover, named Shadow Voyager, is designed to navigate semi-autonomously into permanently shadowed regions of the lunar south pole previously identified as likely to contain water ice and other volatiles, then mine and collect icy regolith and carry it to a processing plant. The Starmine Plant is planned to perform water extraction, purification and electrolysis and to liquefy the resulting oxygen, while managing contaminants and disposing of desiccated regolith; the company reports that in November 2025 it produced 48 grams of gaseous oxygen from icy regolith simulant. The Starmine Tower is a 100 kW-class vertical solar array with single-axis sun tracking, up to 45 meters tall in its flight version, topped by a beacon providing a direct-to-Earth link and communications with the rovers. Starpath positions the system to refuel vehicles such as Starship and Blue Moon and to supply future crewed lunar bases. TechCrunch reported in 2024 that the rovers would carry pressurized cryogenic propellant tanks and a customer-specific refueling interface, and that the first demonstration mission targets the equivalent of about 100 tons of liquid oxygen per year.

The rover program matured through NASA's Break the Ice Lunar Challenge, a Centennial Challenge that asked teams to design, build and demonstrate robots able to excavate and haul icy lunar regolith. Starpath won a cumulative $838,461 across three levels of Phase 2 and took second place overall at the live finale in June 2024. Its entry was a four-wheeled rover with a dual drum excavator that extends from the body and scrapes into hard regolith. As a prize opportunity, the team tested the upgraded rover in 2025 inside the 20-foot V-20 thermal vacuum chamber at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, running excavation and mobility trials on a rocky test slab. In July 2026 Starpath announced its selection to lead NASA's HELION lunar navigation partnership.

Starlight panels came out of Starpath's need for inexpensive power on the lunar surface. US sales began on September 25, 2025, with a non-flight engineering model priced at $9.81 per watt and a flight model at $11.20 per watt, which the company says is about 90% below typical industry pricing; TechCrunch reported that the automated production line could scale to 40 megawatts within a year. In March 2026 the company introduced Starlight Air, which it calls the world's lightest space solar panel, with a price target below $15 per watt.

Starpath raised a $12 million seed round in August 2024, co-led by 8VC and Fusion Fund with participation from Day One Ventures, Balerion Space and Indicator Ventures. Its team includes a chief engineer for Starmine, a head of software engineering, avionics, thermal, chemical and production engineers, and in-house CNC machining.