Muon Space has raised $250m in a round backed by Google and Salesforce, according to their announcement. It is the largest cheque yet written to a company whose best-known product is a constellation that watches for wildfires.
The rise had been visible for a while. Axios reported in June that the California company was gathering $250m in a round led by Eclipse, which puts roughly two months between the first report and the close.
Google’s involvement is the least surprising part. Muon builds and operates FireSat, the wildfire detection constellation developed with the Earth Fire Alliance and Google Research, and it deployed the first three operational satellites in that system in July.
FireSat is designed to spot fires while they are still small, on the order of a classroom rather than a neighbourhood, and to revisit the same ground often enough that the detection is useful to the people who have to drive towards it.
It is the same problem OroraTech is attacking from Munich with a smaller constellation. That is a harder engineering problem than it sounds, and it is the reason the constellation needs dozens of satellites rather than a handful.
