Diffraqtion

Diffraqtion's camera measures what other cameras throw away. Conventional imaging records brightness per pixel and resolution is capped by the diffraction limit of the lens; the company's optics encode information about the scene in the glass itself, which its founders say yields up to twenty times the resolution and a thousand times faster processing from a much smaller aperture, without entangled light sources or cryogenic cooling. The target is a 6U cubesat with a ten-centimetre lens, for about $500,000, that matches the resolution of a far larger satellite.

The physics comes from ten years of DARPA and NASA programmes led by Saikat Guha, a quantum sensing professor at the University of Maryland, who founded the company with Johannes Galatsanos, the chief executive, and Christine Wang, the chief technology officer, in Somerville, Massachusetts. It won the Slush 100 competition in November 2025, closed a $4.2 million pre-seed round in January 2026, QDNL Participations leading, alongside a $1.5 million DARPA contract, and added more than $5 million in August 2026 from Lockheed Martin Ventures, Presidio Ventures, SBI and others.

No camera has flown. The plan is on-sky tests with UC Observatories, ground operations in 2027, a first orbital flight as a hosted payload in 2028 and Earth observation services in 2029, and the funding so far, a little over $10 million, is pre-seed money.