Josiah Gruber is the CEO of Scout Space, a Reston, Virginia company building sensors and software to detect, track and characterize objects in orbit. An optical and RF remote-sensing engineer with more than 15 years of hands-on experience, he joined Scout in 2023 as an engineer, rose to VP of Engineering and then CTO, and took the top job in late 2025. Under his leadership Scout raised an $18M Series A in May 2026 and is putting its Owl optical payload on the inaugural flight of Blue Origin's Blue Ring spacecraft.
Scout Space is a Reston, Virginia defense and space company building the sensing layer for orbit. It develops electro-optical and infrared sensors (Owl and Sparrow), onboard autonomy software co-developed with the U.S. Space Force, and edge-processing and mission-design platforms that let spacecraft detect, track, and characterize objects in orbit - even without ground contact. Scout's pitch: a proliferated network of in-space sensors is fundamental to operating safely in an increasingly crowded and contested orbital environment.