The Story
Satellites Smaller. Faster. Cheaper. Better.
At Pier 70 on San Francisco's waterfront, where workers once riveted hulls of battleships and submarines for two world wars, John Gedmark runs a satellite factory. The contrast is deliberate. The ambition is the same: build things that project power across vast distances at a scale the world hasn't seen before.
Gedmark co-founded Astranis Space Technologies in November 2015, went through Y Combinator, raised a Series A of $4.45 million, and spent years convincing the aerospace establishment that geostationary orbit didn't have to mean billion-dollar school-bus-sized satellites booked years in advance. His MicroGEO satellites - roughly the size of a washing machine - do what traditional GEO satellites do, at a fraction of the cost, on a fraction of the timeline, with a fraction of the headcount per unit.
By the end of 2025, Astranis was operating more than 10 satellites and launching more new GEO spacecraft than the three largest incumbent operators combined. That's not market disruption. That's market replacement.
In May 2026, Astranis raised a $300M Series E at a $2.8 billion valuation, with backing from a16z, BlackRock, Fidelity, and Franklin Templeton. Total capital raised: over $1.2 billion.
The path here was anything but straight. Before Astranis, Gedmark spent five years as co-founder and executive director of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, an industry group representing a fledgling collection of companies - SpaceX, Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic - that most of Washington dismissed as science fiction. In 2010, still in his 20s, he helped engineer one of the most consequential space policy decisions in American history: President Obama's announcement that NASA would use commercial rockets for crewed launches. A single policy shift that unlocked more than $10 billion in government commitment to the commercial sector. Without it, SpaceX might look very different today.
Before that, he was at the X Prize Foundation managing rocket launches for crowds of 20,000 people, including the first public demonstration of a Vertical Take-Off Vertical Landing (VTVL) rocket - the same basic technology that now lands Falcon 9 boosters on drone ships. He watched the future arrive, then decided to build it himself.
Gedmark grew up in Kentucky, son of a doctor and a hospital chaplain. That combination of technical rigor and mission-oriented service runs through everything he builds. When asked why connect Alaska first, or the Philippines, or Mexico - markets other satellite operators had bypassed for decades - the answer was always the same: the mission is getting 4 billion unconnected people online. The government contracts and defense programs came later. The original motivation never changed.
