Constellation Space Builds the Autonomous Backbone for Mega-Scale Satellite Networks
As low-Earth orbit fills with constellations numbering in the tens of thousands, the old playbook of ground-controlled operations is reaching its breaking point. Constellation Space, a Winter 2026 Y Combinator company, believes the fix is not more operators but fewer. The startup is building ConstellationOS, satellite network management software designed to orchestrate hyperscale constellations the way modern cloud platforms orchestrate data centers.
Founded in 2025 by Kamran Majid, Laith Altarabishi, Raaid Kabir, and Omeed Tehrani, the team came together after years of hands-on work inside the programs shaping the modern space industry. The founders previously built and operated satellite systems at SpaceX, Blue Origin, and NASA, and they kept running into the same wall: reactive, human-in-the-loop monitoring simply does not scale once a constellation crosses a few thousand nodes. Ground antennas, licensing regimes, and mission control rooms were designed for fleets of dozens, not for the next generation of commercial and defense networks that will span continents in orbit.
ConstellationOS takes direct aim at that bottleneck. The platform delivers zero-intervention network handoffs between satellites, predictive thermal load-balancing across spacecraft buses, and sub-second optical routing between nodes. Instead of engineers chasing anomalies from a console, the system decides in real time which satellite should carry which packet, how to redistribute thermal load before a component degrades, and when to reroute around a node that is entering an eclipse or a high-radiation pass. The result is an infrastructure stack that behaves less like a fleet of spacecraft and more like a single, self-healing distributed computer.
The company’s founding thesis is that off-world telecommunications and compute will only reach their full potential when the orchestration layer becomes invisible. Constellation Space is betting that sub-second routing protocols and autonomous load-balancing will be as foundational to the next era of space as TCP/IP was to the early internet. With constellations increasingly used for broadband, Earth observation, defense communications, and in-orbit compute, customers need infrastructure that can manage billions of decisions per second without waiting for a ground window.
Momentum is already building. Constellation Space has been spotlighted as one of the new Y Combinator startups poised to change tech and was featured in GeekWire’s roundup of early-stage Seattle tech companies to watch. The team is actively hiring a Software Engineer, a Principal Wireless Engineer, a Head of Operations, and a Graduate/PhD Research Intern in Machine Learning, reflecting an unusually broad technical footprint for a four-person company – one that combines RF systems, distributed systems, and machine learning under a single product roadmap.