SAN FRANCISCO – Capella Space today announced it has added senior business and engineering leaders to the team. Scott Soenen, joins as vice president of product engineering; Matt Wood joins as vice president of go-to-market and business strategy, and Dan Brophy as vice president of U.S. government services. This is in addition to Christian Lenz, who joined as vice president of engineering in July 2018. Off the heels of the successful launch of its first smallsat, Denali, in December of 2018, these hires add significant domain expertise and market experience as the company progresses toward the launch of Sequoia, a commercial imaging satellite set to deploy mid-2019.
“We are building Capella because problems of tomorrow require solutions with a new perspective that didn’t exist yesterday. It is critical for us to attract experienced, out of box thinkers in our industry,” said Payam Banazadeh, CEO and founder of Capella Space. “The expertise these new executives bring will be crucial as we grow our constellation and prove the value of high revisit, high resolution SAR products and services to government and early adopters in commercial markets.”
Soenen has more than 15 years of experience and a deep technical background in turning geospatial data into useful tools for observation, analysis and insight. At Planet Labs, he led a global software team to develop tools to address the full pipeline of geospatial data processing. Prior to joining Planet Labs, he was CTO at RapidEye.
Wood is a 20-year veteran of the geospatial industry specializing in international expansion and bringing new products to the market. He has a track record for pioneering in commercials use and demand for satellite imagery cases, at Digitalglobe, Google/TerraBella Skybox and Ursa Space Systems.
Brophy is a 30-year veteran of aeronautics and astronautics fields with emphasis on defense and intelligence applications. At Orbital ATK he led business development for national security systems and has led teams and initiatives at defense and aerospace blue chips, including General Dynamics “ Advanced Information System, Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corporation and Lockheed Martin Space Systems and Systems Integration Sectors.
Capella is building a constellation of 36 satellites for continuous global monitoring. Each 40 kilogram satellite is a fraction of the time and cost to deployment of traditional SAR systems, enabling the company to rapidly put on-orbit a reliable, redundant, low-latency space infrastructure for high resolution, high revisit Earth observation. The full constellation is expected to be deployed in 2022.
About Capella Space
Capella Space is an aerospace and information services company that provides earth observation on demand. Through a constellation of micro-satellites, Capella is democratizing access to timely and reliable information affecting dozens of industries. Capella’s synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellites are faster to build than traditional satellite systems, cheaper to deploy, and optimized to deliver comprehensive global coverage and insight to improve patterns of commerce, conservation, and well-being on Earth. Learn more at capellaspace.com.
