Tech7 Wins SpaceWERX SBIR Phase II Award for Space Force LEO Testbed
Colorado Springs – October 19, 2026 -- The Tech7 Company has won a Direct to Phase II Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) contract, facilitated by SpaceWERX, to develop the Proliferated LEO Agile Testbed Environment (PLATE) for the U.S. Space Force. Work under the award is scheduled to begin in October.
PLATE targets data pipelines never built for proliferated LEO volumes
The Space Force's shift to proliferated Low Earth Orbit (pLEO) constellations will put hundreds of distributed sensors online, each generating continuous, low-latency data streams that must be processed and acted on in near real time. Today's stove-piped, mission-specific data pipelines were not designed for that load, and PLATE is meant to close the gap.
SpaceWERX, the Space Force's innovation arm, awarded more than 300 contracts totaling $510 million in fiscal year 2025.