Xplore Inc.

Xplore Inc. was founded in 2017 by Jeff Rich and Lisa Rich to make access to space more affordable and useful for commercial, government, and non-profit customers. The company operates under a "Space as a Service" model built around three offerings: Data as a Service (multi- and hyperspectral, SWIR, RGB, UV, RF, and radiation sensing delivered from orbit), Compute as a Service (on-board Linux/ARM edge computing for running customer software payloads directly on the satellite), and Operations as a Service (its Major Tom cloud-based mission control software for tracking, commanding, and monitoring satellite constellations).

Xplore's core spacecraft technology is the XCRAFT platform, a high-performance, ESPA-class satellite bus designed to support missions in low Earth orbit, cislunar space, and deep space (including Venus, Mars, and asteroid missions), while hosting customer payloads from 1U up to 50U or larger. The company has also developed the Xplore Space Telescope (XST) family, built on the XCRAFT bus in collaboration with the W. M. Keck Observatory, and has partnered with Accion Systems to test next-generation electric propulsion aboard its LEO variant (XLEO).

In December 2024, Xplore launched its first hyperspectral satellite, XCUBE-1, on SpaceX's Bandwagon-2 rideshare mission from Vandenberg Space Force Base, and began releasing public hyperspectral imagery in mid-2025. The company has secured contracts with the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) for commercial hyperspectral imagery evaluation and with the National Security Innovation Capital (NSIC) program to accelerate XCRAFT platform development, and holds a Tier-3 commercial remote sensing license from NOAA.

Xplore is headquartered in Redmond, Washington, where it operates a 22,000 sq ft satellite assembly and manufacturing facility opened in 2021.