“Real Voices”

When I’m interviewed in English, I often say that I was an “average boy” as a child. I didn’t have any wild enthusiasms, and there was nothing in particular that wanted to do. I still remember clearly the head teacher at kindergarten telling me: “Most children have a moment when they shine, but yours is still to come.”
A turning point came when I took part in a NASA space camp in high school. I got to meet the Japanese astronaut Mamoru Mohri and even received a written message in his own hand. That experience flicked a switch in me, and from that moment I started to study like crazy. After university, I joined the Ministry of Finance. Then I did a spell with a major consulting firm, and worked in management at an IT company, but just before my forties I suddenly lost my confidence. At the time I was working to develop software and sell it internationally, but I realized that we couldn’t beat the global competition. I thought maybe we’d stand a better chance if we could offer hardware and software as a set, and started looking into various possibilities. This was around the time that 3D printers were becoming a big thing, and I thought that might be the solution. But the results we were getting with 3D printers were not very esthetically pleasing.
Then one day I saw a video on YouTube of high-precision machined spinning tops, and was struck by how attractive they were. I immediately made an appointment to visit the company that made them, and learned that they supplied components to JAXA. And their components were just as attractive in reality as I had imagined from the video. I thought: This is what I want to do—maybe space is the answer. I started reading all kinds of papers on space-related topics, and attending academic conferences, and eventually came across the problem of space debris and learned that no one had come up with a plausible solution to it yet. One week later, the company was founded.

The space business requires huge amounts of capital investment. Two years after starting the company, after raising more than ¥800 million in the Series A round, we went right into Series B. We approached the largest government-private sector fund in Japan, and after a year of back-and-forth, they became quite positive, but with one condition. We had to bring another new private sector investor on board. At that time, no one knew how the space business would expand in the future. It was MUCAP who agreed to join the project. MUCAP had shown interest in our business and the potential direction of the company since immediately after we launched, and always maintained contacts, but our formal relationship started at this time. The success of Series B was largely thanks to MUCAP’s involvement.
MUCAP also helped us out subsequently with Series C. This was vitally important, since the choice of existing venture capital to make further investments is a major factor in reassuring new investors to join. It’s really the biggest proof of the future potential of your project.
After Series C, our first attempt to launch a satellite in November 2017 ended in failure. This was our most testing time, having lost the satellite we had managed to develop after so much hard work. With deep tech, a steady accumulation of milestones is vital for gaining the understanding and trust of investors, so this was an extremely difficult experience for us. But our shareholders continued to support us. MUCAP was particularly helpful as one of our existing investors—the investment professional from MUCAP in charge of our case did everything they could for us, and we were able to secure additional investment. This was an extremely happy outcome for us, and everyone on the team was extremely moved. Thanks to this, we were able to raise our largest amount of capital as a company in Series D, our next round of fundraising.

We are steadily progressing toward our goal of making on-orbit services something that will be taken for granted by 2030. We have development teams at our bases in five countries around the world, and are taking orders for all kinds of diverse jobs. The overall picture is made available in the materials for shareholders on our website—but to summarize for now, our plan is to launch satellites every year from next fiscal year, and to carry out test runs for missions including active debris removal, and satellite refueling and life extension. We are also collaborating with government agencies and organizations in countries around the world to formulate rules on space development, and are moving forward with various projects in parallel at the same time.
Most Japanese start-ups only expand to other countries once the business has been successfully established in Japan, but with the space debris problem there is no time for such a leisurely way of doing things. Our kind of global approach costs more money, but our ability to respond speedily to things as they happen is positively evaluated by investors in Japan and internationally. We want to increasingly accelerate these developments further in the future.