Stellatus Solutions, a Startup Born at UChicago and Nurtured By Polsky, Acquired by Slingshot Aerospace to Help Prevent Satellite Collisions in Space

Originally published by Alexia Elejalde-Ruiz, associate director of media relations and external communications at the Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the University of Chicago.

Last fall, a team of University of Chicago students was tasked with addressing a challenge: how to improve communication between satellite operators to prevent collisions between the 4,000 satellites in space—a number expected to rocket to 115,000 satellites by 2030.

This was presented as a theoretical problem in “Hacking for Defense,” a cross-disciplinary course sponsored by the Department of Defense. But when students learned this is in fact a reality faced by satellite owner-operators, they were inspired to create a startup—Stellatus Solutions—that they then took through the National Science Foundation’s I-Corps Program and the Edward L. Kaplan, ’71, New Venture Challenge.

The two co-founders, Holly Highfill and Kishen Raghunath, never imagined that, within a year their startup would be acquired to help spearhead the industry’s first centralized collision avoidance communications platform for space.