Ninety-seven percent. That is the share of operational satellites in orbit that Charter Space estimates are flying uninsured, and it is the number a $5 million seed round was raised against on 30 September 2026.
The El Segundo company, founded in 2021 by Yuk Chi Chan and Yukun Yin, closed an oversubscribed round led by Crystal Venture Partners, with QED, Blank Ventures, Gaingels and Hustle Fund joining. Total financing now stands at $8 million. Its brokerage serves more than 50 companies across the US space and defence industrial base.
What makes a round this size worth reading is the market sitting behind it. Aon's Q1 2026 space insurance report counts 25 insurers underwriting space risks worldwide. Maximum theoretical capacity for launch risk in 2026 sits at roughly $709 million; in-orbit risk, roughly $669 million. Both are up $40 million on January 2025.
CHRONICLE: From test data to the underwriting table
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Founded Insurer CIRC $5M Nuclear
in El product brokerage seed craft,
Segundo with four licensed closed servicing,
majors nationally lunar
Chronology compiled from the Charter Space newsroom, Payload and TechCrunch coverage, 2025–2026.
Charter Space's edge is informational. The test and manufacturing telemetry already sat inside its own engineering software, and moving underwriting from months to about two weeks changes what counts as insurable.
The unresolved exposure is the newest asset class. If orbital compute cannot be modelled, the capital that would build it cannot be priced either.
The ceiling nobody prices
Aon's capacity figures describe a hard ceiling on how much risk the industry can absorb in a year. At roughly $709 million for launch and $669 million for in-orbit, that is capacity, not premium volume — the money that would actually flow if every covered asset found a policy.
The direction of travel is upward, and Aon attributes most of the new room to underwriters who left and came back through new ventures. One example: Phemis Underwriters, assembled from the team that previously ran space at Hiscox, offering $25 million of pre-launch and launch capacity between three people.
Theoretical launch capacity
The ceiling Aon reports for launch risk in 2026, up $40 million on January 2025. In-orbit capacity sits close behind at about $669 million, also up $40 million. · Aon Space Insurance Market Report Q1 2026
Set against tens of thousands of satellites expected before 2030, those numbers stay modest. Marsh's space practice estimated in August 2026 that the whole annual space premium pool runs at roughly $500 million to $750 million, written by about 30 insurers worldwide. The insurance market for space is small, mature in form, and still priced for a different industry than the one now being built.
A software firm that noticed the data was already there
Charter Space did not set out to underwrite anything. Chan and Yin built a cloud platform for aerospace engineering — the company calls it Ubik — that pulls technical, manufacturing and test data into one place so engineers can build missions. Then they looked at what an insurer does with that same spacecraft and realised the manual process was the bottleneck.
The description insurance buyers give for the old process is blunt. Regular insurers, in Charter's account, heard a list of technical terms and declined to price them. Early on the company partnered with Munich Re, AXA XL, ASIC and Price Forbes, the Lloyd's of London broker, to launch a product aimed at widening access.
On 25 February 2026 Charter took the next step and launched the Charter Interplanetary Risk Corporation, a nationally licensed brokerage acting on behalf of space companies, earning commission on placements. Minimum insurable asset value: $2 million.
What CIRC actually covers
What changed is speed. Pairing CIRC's records with an AI-assisted underwriting tool moved the time to secure a policy from months to roughly two weeks. That is the product, and it is the reason demand outruns the sales team.
Share of spacecraft flying uninsured
Charter Space's own estimate of how many operational satellites in orbit carry no insurance policy — the addressable base for a brokerage selling coverage to first-time buyers. · Payload, February 2026
As we wrote in September, the launch-capacity squeeze was already visible from the launch side of the market. Insurance is the same constraint seen from the balance-sheet side: the asset exists, the revenue is projected, and the instrument that would let a lender take a position on it does not yet exist at scale.
Insurance as a financing instrument
The pitch Charter makes to founders is not primarily about risk transfer. It is about who is willing to fund the mission. Chan argues that a covered spacecraft can be financed with debt and credit instead of depending entirely on venture equity and growth capital — the sort of capital stack any other advanced industry takes for granted.
We want more satellites to get insured, because that means everything as a whole is much safer. If we can proliferate insurance coverage, that's good for the space industrial base — companies have a safety net. It's also a lot healthier for the overall economy, because then that encourages global investment from different alternative capital sources.— Yuk Chi Chan, founder and CEO, Charter Space
The regulatory conversation runs in the same direction. Michael Yaworsky, Florida's commissioner of insurance regulation, frames underwriting capacity as infrastructure in its own right, and Florida as the launch state that would benefit from building it.
Insurance is the precondition for growth in space. The state that leads on insurance will be the destination for capital investing in the industries of the future.— Michael Yaworsky, Commissioner of Insurance Regulation, Florida
The asset nobody can model yet
Then there is the part of the market that does not fit any historical model. Blue Origin filed plans in March for 51,600 data-centre satellites in low Earth orbit, and Starcloud has already flown an Nvidia H100 GPU in orbit. None of that hardware has an actuarial history.
Reporting from mid-2026 found underwriters returning to the same obstacle. The commercial question is not what to charge but whether a risk can be modelled at all, and the valuation of fast-moving AI silicon in a harsh thermal environment has no precedent. Atrium's space underwriter points out that venture-backed operators would have to expand before a major insurance market exists for them.
Marsh put the whole space premium pool at roughly $500–750 million a year in August 2026, against prospective orbital compute infrastructure running into the hundreds of billions. Its framing is that orbital compute risk is barely correlated with terrestrial catastrophe — which helps until a correlated cascade event in orbit disables thousands of spacecraft at once. Insurers' trade press has flagged exactly that scenario as a systemic risk the market has yet to fully price. Underwriters have decades of satellite experience and almost no data on the assets now being planned.
Three turns inside five years
The round marks the third distinct repositioning for the company. First came engineering software, sold to engineers building spacecraft. Then an insurance product developed with Munich Re, AXA XL, ASIC and Price Forbes, aimed at widening access to cover. Then a nationally licensed brokerage, in February.
Each step moved Charter closer to the transaction and further from the engineering bench. Owning the brokerage means keeping commission, owning the customer relationship and setting the terms of record. The $8 million raised to date buys a bigger sales organisation and a wider product range. Charter also points to expanding its engineering, data science and actuarial teams and accelerating its real-time orbital risk-modelling platform.
The roadmap names the hard cases directly: space-based nuclear power, in-space servicing flights, and hardware bound for the Moon. Those are the missions no incumbent insurer wants to write first, and they are also the ones where a technical-data advantage is worth the most.
What it changes
For investors, the useful read is narrower than the press coverage suggests. Charter Space is not repricing space risk; it is compressing the cost of producing an underwriting file. That is a software margin story sitting inside an insurance distribution story.
The demand case is not in doubt. Ninety-seven percent uninsured, tens of thousands of satellites due before 2030, and a shortage of underwriters rather than a shortage of buyers. Whether the business compounds depends on whether the company can keep converting engineering telemetry into a price fast enough to stay ahead of the incumbents it is now courting — and whether the assets its customers finally want covered can be modelled before the money arrives.