Basalt

Basalt is a Y Combinator W24 graduate developing Dispatch, a spacecraft operating system and fleet coordination platform that provides autonomous tasking, scheduling, and conflict resolution for satellite constellations spanning hardware from multiple manufacturers — addressing the growing fragmentation of the commercial satellite industry where operators increasingly field mixed fleets of satellites from different vendors with incompatible ground software interfaces.

The Dispatch OS abstracts over satellite-specific command interfaces to present a unified API for mission operators, enabling a single software platform to schedule imaging requests, manage propellant budgets, coordinate collision avoidance maneuvers, and optimize coverage across satellites from different manufacturers — eliminating the need to maintain separate mission operations software stacks for each vendor's hardware.

This multi-manufacturer compatibility is the company's core differentiator: as commercial operators increasingly procure satellites from multiple suppliers to reduce concentration risk and access the best-in-class subsystems from a competitive market, the mission software complexity multiplies rapidly without an abstraction layer. Basalt raised a $3.5M seed round to develop the platform, targeting mid-size constellation operators (10-100 satellites) who lack the engineering resources to build custom orchestration software but need more flexibility than standard turnkey mission operations center solutions.

The company competes in the adjacent space with Cognitive Space (AI mission planning, Austin TX), Orbit Logic (professional mission planning tools for civil agencies), and the growing internal software teams at Planet Labs, Spire, and other large commercial constellation operators who have built proprietary orchestration platforms that smaller competitors cannot afford to replicate.