Space doesn’t wait, and neither does Cascade Space. While the rest of the industry files RF link budgets in spreadsheets like it’s still the Shuttle era, these guys are pulling 1 Mbps telemetry from a probe 58 million miles out. Not metaphorically. Literally. NASA’s STEREO-A. Real signal. Real-time.
Jacob Portukalian and Arlen Abraham didn’t just read the brief. They wrote the operating manual. After high-impact stints at SpaceX, Astra, and SPAN, they launched Cascade in April 2025, fresh off Y Combinator’s X25 batch, to take on the bottlenecks holding back lunar and deep-space communications. Their thesis was brutally simple: if we can land robots on the Moon, we shouldn’t need three PhDs and a four-week ops window just to get a downlink scheduled.
Now they’ve closed a $5.9M seed round led by Nova Threshold and Undeterred Capital, with support from a deep bench, Y Combinator, Night Capital, Olive Capital, Karman Ventures, Palm Drive Capital, Liquid 2 Ventures, and more who clearly see the ground game forming here. With the RF lab humming in Oakland and HQ pulsing in downtown SF, they’ve got eyes on 15 paying customers by end of next year and are already working LOIs with lunar landers across the U.S., Europe, and Japan.
And no, this isn’t just another “we’re building an API for space” press hit. Cascade is stacking real IP, real infrastructure, and real product. They’ve got a “ground-station-in-a-box” that simulates orbital RF chains before payloads even leave the bench. Their Cascade Portal platform handles real-time link-margin calculations across S-, X-, and Ka-band, with CCSDS, DTN, and DVB baked right in. It’s like going from ham radio to AWS in one leap, minus the latency.
The game is shifting. The Deep Space Network is oversubscribed. Comms cycles are too slow. Operators need tools that move like the missions they’re launching. Cascade’s platform trims RF integration time by 80%. You want to hit Mars window? You need Cascade in the loop.
This funding will fuel a network expansion across three continents, Canary Islands, Alaska, New Zealand, and ramp the team from 8 to 20 by Q1 2026. By then, expect Ka-band support, pass-scheduling AI, and a real-time packet loss dashboard that doesn’t need a ground engineer to decipher.
Jacob Portukalian, Arlen Abraham, and Brett Gottula are building the backbone of next-gen space comms. And now they’ve got the backing to match.
