Aalyria has closed a $100 million Series B round at a $1.3 billion valuation, a number that signals how central space networking has become to everything from commercial connectivity to national security. The round was led by Battery Ventures and J2 Ventures, with participation from DYNE and additional investors, and it’s aimed squarely at scaling something space has historically lacked: a true, intelligent networking layer. Not faster rockets, not more satellites, but the connective tissue that makes thousands of moving assets behave like a single, reliable system.
At the core of Aalyria’s approach are two tightly coupled platforms that feel less like hardware and software products and more like infrastructure. Spacetime is a managed orchestration layer that constantly recalculates how data should flow as satellites move, weather shifts, and priorities change, while Tightbeam provides ultra-high-speed laser communications terminals capable of pushing enormous volumes of data through narrow, secure optical links. Together they turn what used to be brittle, point-to-point connections into adaptive networks that can reroute around disruptions in real time, whether those disruptions happen in orbit, in the air, or on the ground. It’s the difference between a single road and a living traffic system that keeps working even when bridges go out.
The company was founded in 2021 by CEO Chris Taylor and CTO Brian Barritt through the acquisition of two advanced technologies developed over more than a decade at Google and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. That heritage shows in how Aalyria talks about its mission. Taylor describes the company as building the “digital cartilage” of space, a control plane that coordinates complexity at scale the way the internet did for terrestrial networks. The ambition isn’t modest: to make space infrastructure as programmable, resilient, and dependable as the internet itself, capable of routing around failures automatically and optimizing for mission needs without human micromanagement.
This matters because modern aerospace and defense systems increasingly rely on narrow, directional beams instead of broadcast radio. Laser and tightly focused RF links deliver higher throughput and better security, but they’re also far less forgiving. A slight misalignment, a passing storm, or a terrain obstruction can collapse a link entirely. Aalyria’s technology exists to manage that fragility, predicting disruptions, shifting paths, and coordinating assets so the network keeps moving even when everything else does. In a world of tens of thousands of satellites and mobile platforms, that kind of orchestration stops being a nice-to-have and starts looking unavoidable.
Investors clearly see it that way. Michael Brown of Battery Ventures, who will join Aalyria’s board, framed the company as sitting at the intersection of advanced networking, AI-driven orchestration, and national security, a combination that tends to age well in uncertain geopolitical climates. On the customer side, Aalyria’s technology is already being integrated into flagship programs, including next-generation low Earth orbit constellations and U.S. government missions. Telesat has publicly confirmed that Spacetime will play a role in its Lightspeed architecture, using dynamic routing and predictive link management to strengthen global service delivery across its LEO network.
What’s striking is how broad Aalyria’s ecosystem has become in just a few years. The company works with Google Public Sector, NASA, Airbus, ALL.SPACE, Keysight Technologies, Logos Space, the European Space Agency, and multiple U.S. military services. That mix of commercial, civil, and defense partners hints at why investors are comfortable assigning a billion-plus valuation so early: orchestration layers tend to sit quietly underneath everything, and once they’re embedded, they’re hard to replace.
J2 Ventures’ Alex Harstrick put it bluntly, noting that the space economy has reached an inflection point where isolated assets no longer scale. Treating satellites and airborne platforms as nodes in an intelligent, coordinated network isn’t just elegant engineering, it’s operationally necessary. Aalyria, headquartered in Livermore with offices in Washington, D.C., Pittsburgh, and London, is positioning itself as the company that makes that shift possible. If the next decade of space looks less like a collection of independent missions and more like a shared, global infrastructure, the quiet systems doing the coordinating may end up being the most valuable ones of all.
Leave a Reply