Rendezvous Robotics exits stealth with $3M to build reconfigurable space infrastructure

For decades, engineers designing space structures have been constrained by the rocket fairing: only hardware that can be folded up to fit inside can go to orbit.

This makes in-space assembly time intensive and expensive. The International Space Station, the largest single object humanity has built in space, was assembled over dozens of launches and cost over $100 billion. And, of course, there is no way to modify or alter the structure once it has been assembled.

Rendezvous Robotics^[1] wants to change that.

“If you’re designing a space mission and trying to get a capability to space, you’re constrained by two things,” co-founder and President Joe Landon said in a recent interview. “One, you have to build something that can either fit or fold into a rocket, and you also have to constrain yourself by what satellite bus you’re going to go on. We saw that increasingly, missions need more scale and more size … larger antennas, higher power, and with higher power, the need for larger radiators.”

Instead of astronauts and robotic arms, Rendezvous is betting on autonomous swarm assembly and electromagnetism. The company is commercializing a technology called “tesserae,” flat-packed modular tiles that can launch in dense stacks and magnetically latch to form structures on obit. With a software command, the tiles are designed to unlatch and rearrange themselves when the mission changes.

“They find each other, they communicate… they arrange themselves, come together using magnetic docking and then latch together,” Landon said. “If you want to change that arrangement or replace something or upgrade, you can just send a command … unlatch, move over here, go into storage or come out of storage and we can change the arrangement.”

The current tiles are around the size of a dinner plate and roughly an inch thick, though the team envisions scaling tiles to the diameter of a rocket fairing. Each tile has its own processor, a variety of sensors and a battery. These are “pretty simple” devices designed for mass manufacturing at low cost, Rendezvous CEO and co-founder Phil Frank said.

The technology was invented by Ariel Ekblaw during her time at MIT, and incubated at Aurelia Institute, the nonprofit organization she founded. She teamed up with Frank, a telecom veteran, and Landon, a longtime space executive, to spin the tech out of Aurelia and take it to the commercial marketplace.

The company was formalized around Thanksgiving 2024, and the team has been busy “evangelizing the solution and the technology” since, as Frank puts it.

Landon, who started his career as an engineer in Boeing’s commercial satellites business and later led R&D at Lockheed Martin Space, said the company is headquartered just outside of Denver.

Rendezvous closed a $3 million pre-seed led by Aurelia Foundy and 8090 Industries, with ATX Venture Partners, Mana Ventures, and angel investors. The round willbe used to hire more employees and help move the tech from demo to a full-scale product on orbit.

The company is first targeting missions “where physical scale, physical size is going to drive performance,” Landon said, like missions that demand large solar arrays or large antenna apertures. On the commercial side, the focus is on communications missions that need large antenna apertures to communicate with small antennas on the ground, like phones or cars. For national security, it’s remote sensing that benefits from very sensitive detection systems.

Tile prototypes have already flown on Blue Origin’s New Shepard and on two missions aboard the International Space Station. The ISS demonstrations proved out the autonomous docking, self-correction, and reconfiguration capabilities.

Looking ahead, the company is aiming to conduct a demo on the ISS in early 2026, followed by a mission outside the ISS in late 2026 or early 2027. That will be followed by “a real mission that shows mission utility,” Landon said, building an antenna aperture in space.

“We’re not building a specific thing,” he said. “We’re providing a new way to build. It’s the ‘how’ you build, not the ‘what’ you build.”