LeoLabs – a leading provider of integrated solutions that persistently monitor activity in space to reveal threats to safety and security – announced Tony Frazier has been appointed as its new CEO. Frazier will lead LeoLabs as it scales to become a critical mission partner for combined military space operations and next-generation space safety systems.
Frazier’s experience in driving innovation at the intersection of commercial space and national security will help LeoLabs further accelerate its growth and solidify its position as an industry leader. And most recently, as the Executive Vice President and General Manager of Public Sector Earth Intelligence at Maxar Technologies, Frazier led a $1 billion business that supported missions across the U.S. Government and over 60 international customers.
While at Maxar, GeoEye, and DigitalGlobe, Frazier became a trusted mission partner, won billions of dollars in new contract awards, and incubated two new businesses scaled above $100 million.
Space is increasingly congested and contested, and in 2020, there were approximately 2,500 operational satellites in Low Earth Orbit. Forecasts indicate this number could exceed 12,000 by the end of 2024 and upwards of 70,000 by 2030. And while much of this growth has been driven by the commercial sector, many nations are making strategic investments in space. For example, China has reported that it intends to build a constellation of 26,000 satellites. This growth of activity in space has created a need for a new class of safety and security solutions.
Dan Ceperley co-founded LeoLabs in 2016 while at SRI International. And as CEO, Ceperley led the development of the company’s proprietary radar technology, completing its first radar site in 2017 and expanding the network globally to include 10 radars in under six years. And under his leadership, LeoLabs built the world’s largest commercially owned catalog of objects and activities in Low Earth Orbit and developed the fastest and most comprehensive data analytics platform for space operations. It has won multiple multi-million-dollar contracts and raised more than $120 million in venture capital funding. Ceperley will transition into a Chief Operations Officer role to lead LeoLabs’ engineering and mission operations as a key executive on Frazier’s leadership team.
LeoLabs experienced strong momentum over the past year. The company was recently selected by the U.S. Space Force to participate in the Space Systems Command’s SDA TAP Lab Accelerator where it is demonstrating how its AI-powered solutions can be applied to Space Battle Management. Additionally, LeoLabs is supporting international allies as they establish their military space operations. The company was also selected to provide a commercial foundation for the U.S. Department of Commerce’s historic civil space traffic coordination system.
KEY QUOTES:
“After my experience at Maxar, I was looking for a company bringing commercial innovation to a critical national security mission. LeoLabs is delivering incredible capabilities in the emerging markets of space situational awareness and space domain awareness. LeoLabs was the first company to detect a secondary object released by a Russian satellite in November and persistently tracked China’s spaceplane for over 200 days between 2022 and 2023, detecting several maneuvers, deployments, and docking activities.”
“At Maxar, we leveraged the unique capabilities of our constellation, advances in computing, and geospatial analytics expertise to become the industry leader in Earth Intelligence. LeoLabs has built the right capabilities at the right time to become a critical mission partner for U.S., allied, and commercial space operators. I’m excited to join LeoLabs as CEO to build on its market momentum and scale its growth.”
— Tony Frazier
“One of my proudest accomplishments is to see the technology we developed at LeoLabs used to impact customer missions. The number of satellites and space threats is growing at an unprecedented rate. Frazier is going to take the great capabilities and customer relationships we pioneered and scale them to become an indispensable source of information for the global space industry. I’m thrilled to get back to my engineering roots and support him by delivering the technology that will power this transition. We have new sensor hardware in the works, new AI-powered analytics, software integrations, and cutting-edge R&D that will make 2024 an exciting year.”
— Dan Ceperley
“It is terrific to see how Dan and the LeoLabs team have taken a nascent technology developed at SRI under funding from the U.S. Department of Defense and the National Science Foundation and grown it from a prototype to a product lockstep with the growth of the commercial space business. The Board and I are grateful for Dan’s contributions and are excited for what is to come under Tony’s leadership.”
– LeoLabs Board Chairman Manish Kothari
