Founder Builds Space Domain Threat Detection Platform

Bianca Cefalo Rewrites the Rules for Space Safety

Fed up with corporate bureaucracy, engineer and product leader Bianca Cefalo founded Space DOTS in 2022 to tackle a growing problem: the gap between lab simulations and the messy reality of orbit. Her team built SKY‑I, a software platform designed to detect, interpret, and attribute both natural and human‑originated threats to spacecraft in real time.

Cefalo brings decades of hands‑on experience: she worked as a thermofluid dynamics analyst on NASA’s InSight mission, helped put telecom satellites into orbit as a product manager at Airbus Defence and Space, and has been part of projects that landed hardware on the Moon. Yet she says corporate “innovation” often ended at lip service — new ideas were rejected unless already flight‑proven.

That frustration led her to build a company that owns both hardware and software, capturing real in‑orbit environmental data rather than relying solely on ground modeling. The result: a platform that turns raw sensor inputs into attribution, now‑casting, and forecasts so operators can act before minor anomalies become mission failures.

Space DOTS argues that almost 15% of spacecraft suffer anomalies or failures because manufacturers and operators misunderstand what space is actually like. Ground simulations help, but they can’t fully reproduce the diversity of orbital regimes, radiation effects, or the complex interactions that happen in real time.

SKY‑I addresses that by generating proprietary in‑orbit environment data from payloads and fusing it with external sources. The platform emphasizes attribution — distinguishing between benign space weather, hardware glitches, and potential hostile activity — and does so with decentralized software to increase resilience and scalability across low Earth, cislunar, and deep‑space operations.

• Real‑time detection and attribution of orbital events
• Fusion of proprietary in‑orbit telemetry with external datasets
• Now‑casting and forecasting for mission planning
• Hardware and software ownership for end‑to‑end validation
• Decentralized architecture for resilience across orbits

Space DOTS recently closed a $1.5 million seed round led by Female Founders Fund, bringing total funding to $3.2 million with participation from Sie Ventures, Feel Ventures, and General Electric Company. Cefalo described fundraising as a “dating‑to‑marry” process: a mix of cold outreach, warm intros, and persistence.

Competitors include Ensemble Space Labs and Mission Space, but Space DOTS positions itself differently by focusing on commercial and defense attribution, owning payload hardware, and delivering decentralized software that can scale into cislunar and multi‑orbit ecosystems. The company plans to expand teams in London and the U.S. and prepare for upcoming launches.

Cefalo frames the mission as more than a business: it’s a case for shared knowledge. The more operators and agencies understand the orbital environment, she argues, the better we can protect navigation, national infrastructure, civil safety, and defense. That data, she says, should not be siloed inside corporations or single agencies but treated as shared planetary understanding.

For organizations building or operating spacecraft, the takeaway is clear: in‑orbit truth beats optimistic lab assumptions. Operators need fused telemetry, attribution logic, and practical forecasts to make timely decisions. That shift requires both payload data and a software stack that translates signals into concrete action.

QuarkyByte’s approach mirrors that operational mindset: combine signal validation, contextual data fusion, and scenario modeling to produce actionable risk metrics and response playbooks. For defense teams, civil infrastructure owners, and commercial satellite operators, that means turning noisy telemetry into prioritized alerts, validated attribution, and integration paths for mission control systems.

Space DOTS’ rise underlines a larger shift in the space industry: a move toward operational intelligence that treats space as an environment to be understood, not just a place to test hardware. As commercial and defense activity increases across multiple orbital regimes, that intelligence will become essential to mission success and planetary safety.