Subramanian said Anduril will fully absorb ExoAnalytic in the acquisition, adding the firm’s 130 employees to Anduril’s space sector staff of 120. ExoAnalytic has the “best catalog and the best ability” to track objects in geostationary orbit, Subramanian said, providing visibility into an area of valuable real estate used by the US military and foreign governments for communications, missile warning, and spying.

According to its website, ExoAnalytic’s sensor network has collected billions of observations with “high-quality astrometric and photometric measurement data.” The dataset allows ExoAnalytic to discern satellite maneuvers, stability changes, anomalies, and more.

ExoAnalytic’s technology also has applications in missile defense, improving Anduril’s position to take a role in the Pentagon’s Golden Dome program. “They are experts in digital signal processing, seeker theory, seeker design, and estimation of targets, discriminating the hard body, discriminating the target from other things that might be in the environment,” Subramanian said.

“In a missile defense use case, it’s really important to know where is the missile,” he said. “When you look at these images, it’s just a bunch of pixels that are very blurry, and to be able to turn that into ‘this is where the missile is,’ and then even to do the super resolution, internal to that, which is ‘here is the shape of the missile. Here’s what you’re seeing. Here are the important points that you need to be aware of on that hard body.’ That’s really, really sophisticated stuff. I wish I could go deeper into it, but given the sensitivity of what we do, we can’t.”

While Anduril will continue serving ExoAnalytic’s commercial customers, the company will develop new products that are “less commercial in nature and more fit for purpose,” Subramanian said. In other words, Anduril will tailor its space tech for military use.

“Our ability to do things terrestrially, like the events going on over the last few weeks, are all hinged on our ability to access and leverage space for those missions,” Subramanian said. “So we want that as the thesis of our business unit. That’s what we’re focused on. We’re not doing GPS. We’re not doing weather. We are focused on protecting space, assuring access to space, ensuring custody of space, ensuring that we can track everything, and that’s what we’re going to continue rapidly investing in.”