Kubos (acquired by Xplore)

Kubos Corporation was a Denton, Texas-based satellite software company founded in 2014 by Marshall Culpepper, Jesse Hamner, and Tyler Browder. The company set out to solve a persistent problem in the smallsat industry: nearly every satellite team was building bespoke, one-off flight and ground software from scratch. Kubos's first major product, KubOS, released as a developer preview in 2016 and reaching a 1.0 release in 2017, was marketed as an open-source, end-to-end operating system for small spacecraft, combining a real-time OS or embedded Linux core, a hardware abstraction layer, and flight middleware. KubOS was adopted by nanosatellite manufacturers including ISIS, NanoAvionics, and Pumpkin Inc.

Kubos later shifted its primary commercial focus to Major Tom, a cloud-based mission operations platform for satellite tracking, ground station scheduling, commanding, and telemetry monitoring across multiple ground station networks. Major Tom was designed to be constellation- and mission-agnostic, offering a browser-based dashboard, REST API, role-based access control, and enterprise security compliance including ITAR and NIST alignment.

On April 4, 2022, space infrastructure company Xplore Inc. acquired Kubos Corporation and its Major Tom platform. Kubos's team joined Xplore, where Major Tom continues to operate as Xplore's 'Operations as a Service' offering, running Xplore's own satellite constellation as well as being sold to external satellite operators. The kubos.com domain now redirects to xplore.com.