Space is the kind of market that doesn’t care about hype, it cares about physics, reliability, and whether your hardware survives in orbit. That’s why when mPower Technology, Inc. announced a strategic investment from Lockheed Martin Ventures, it wasn’t just another funding headline. It was a quiet flex from a company that started as a Sandia National Laboratories spin-out and now finds itself at the center of the commercial space economy growth curve. Founded in 2015 by Dr. Murat Okandan, the scientist who turned microsystems-enabled photovoltaic research into DragonSCALES™, mPower Technology, Inc. has taken flexible silicon solar technology from the lab bench to satellites already beaming data back from orbit.
When Kevin Hell stepped in as President and CEO in 2019, he brought a resume that reads like a roadmap for scaling technology businesses, DivX, Palm, Gateway, and a Wharton MBA to boot. Under his leadership, the company doubled down on turning DragonSCALES into more than just a science project. It’s now a scalable power platform capable of delivering megawatts to spacecraft constellations that need resilience and affordability in equal measure. Pair that with Dr. Murat Okandan’s technical leadership, and you’ve got a founder-operator duo who understand both sides of the equation: build something revolutionary, then actually deliver it at scale.
This Series B expansion is the kind of capital that means more than dollars. Razor’s Edge Ventures and Shield Capital kicked off the $21M round in May, with Cottonwood Technology Fund, Sun Mountain Capital, and others already in the mix. Now Lockheed Martin Ventures adds fuel, pushing the Series B past $24M and total funding north of $28M. That’s not a vanity cap table, it’s a strategic alliance that opens doors in national security space while giving mPower Technology, Inc. the resources to expand its automated manufacturing beyond the current 2 megawatts per year. For context, that’s already more than the combined global output of legacy gallium arsenide suppliers.
And it’s not just about volume. Airbus Netherlands has tapped mPower Technology, Inc. to deliver over 1.1 megawatts of solar modules for more than 200 spacecraft under the MDA AURORA program, with deliveries kicking off in 2025. Lynk Global’s Tower 1 satellite is already flying DragonSCALES. Contracts with Blue Origin’s Honeybee Robotics, Firefly Aerospace, and Gravitics prove this isn’t a one-hit wonder. The technology is flight-proven, commercially validated, and increasingly essential as constellations scale into the hundreds.
The lesson here is simple but brutal: space rewards execution. You can’t pitch your way into orbit. mPower Technology, Inc. earned this moment by building tech that is three to five times cheaper than legacy solar, resilient under radiation, and flexible enough to fit spacecraft designs that traditional rigid panels could never accommodate. Investors like Lockheed Martin Ventures don’t just cut checks for potential. They invest in what works, what scales, and what aligns with the next decade of space infrastructure.
Congrats to the mPower Technology team. They didn’t just secure funding, they secured validation from one of aerospace’s biggest names. DragonSCALES isn’t just power for spacecraft. It’s power for the entire next wave of the space economy, and mPower Technology, Inc. just made sure they’ll have the juice to scale it.
