LOGAN, Utah — French space mobility company Exotrail has created two U.S. subsidiaries as a part of efforts to serve a growing variety of American customers.
Exotrail announced Aug. 7 that it has created Exotrail U.S. Inc. and Exotrail U.S. Federal Inc. to serve the American market. Tyler Browder, co-founder and former chief executive of space software company Kubos, is chief executive of Exotrail U.S.
The brand new subsidiaries are a part of an expansion strategy for the French company funded by a $58 million Series B round it raised in February. The corporate offers a line of electrical propulsion systems called spaceware in addition to mission design and operations software. It is usually developing spacedrop, an area logistics service that incorporates a tug to deploy satellites to their desired orbits.
David Henri, co-founder and chief product officer of Exotrail, said in an interview in the course of the Small Satellite Conference that, within the near term, Exotrail U.S. will sell spaceware thrusters on to U.S. customers to ease the challenges of exporting the thrusters from France to the U.S. It should also arrange software services on U.S. cloud computing infrastructure.
The 2 subsidiaries will serve different customers. “Exotrail U.S. is concentrated on business entities, helping them herald technologies from France,” Browder said in an interview. “The federal one is exclusively focused on U.S. government work, whether civil or defense related.”
Browder said that Exotrail is seeing stronger business and government demand for propulsion as smallsats move up in size from cubesats to microsats. There’s also growing interest in orbital transfer vehicles despite problem some corporations have had developing and demonstrating them.
“On the defense side we’re seeing pretty big signals,” said Brian Holt, director of U.S. government business development and partnerships for Exotrail U.S. “Exotrail is a one-stop shop from an area logistics perspective, so we’re positioned to support all those defense requirements.”
In the subsequent yr, Exotrail plans to ascertain a production facility in the USA for its spaceware thrusters. It should even be an integration facility for spacedrop vehicles in order that U.S. customers don’t must ship their satellites to Europe for integration after which back to the U.S. for launch.
“We’re searching for a city that makes probably the most sense for our customer base, our supply chain and our talent base,” Browder said. The corporate’s goal is to begin production of spaceware thrusters from that U.S. site by the top of 2024.
Those facilities will support a growing customer base. Henri said Exotrail already has customers reminiscent of Astro Digital, Starfish Space and York Space Systems, in addition to others it has not announced. A 3rd of Exotrail’s customer base is in North America, with one other third in Europe and the rest in Asia.
“Within the U.S. definitely we see a number of traction,” he said, which the brand new subsidiaries will help foster by higher supporting existing customers and attracting latest U.S. customers.
“We figured we didn’t need a U.S. presence to begin,” he said, working contract relationships remotely. “We’re enthusiastic about what we’ll get with this U.S. presence and imagine we will turn out to be a primary contractor for each business and government customers here within the U.S.”