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.
Tech7 will build an unclassified AWS-based testbed for the Space Development Agency
Tech7 will prototype an AWS-based Space Development Agency (SDA) testbed at the unclassified level. The environment will mature, test and demonstrate applications for use within one or more SDA tranches. The company describes a transition path to an objective multi-security-level system in a future SBIR Phase III. Once complete, PLATE will support SDA's Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture (PWSA).
Existing missile warning work gives Tech7 a base of mature applications
The effort builds on Tech7's on-site support to the SSC Missile Warning enterprise, including the OPIR Tools, Applications and Processing (TAP) Lab and the SSC OPIR Modeling and Simulation Analysis Center (OMAC). That footprint lets the team reuse high-TRL applications rather than start from scratch.
Zero-trust, modular design aims at multi-level security and coalition operations
Paul Zetocha, Tech7 Principal Investigator and Chief Engineer, said the hard problem in proliferated LEO is "processing it, fusing it, trusting it, and acting on it fast enough to matter." He said PLATE is designed to be modular, zero-trust and continuously scalable, with a deliberate path to multi-level security and coalition operations.
CEO Juan Echeverry said the environment will let technology from large primes, small businesses and non-traditional innovators be evaluated on its merits and transitioned to operations without introducing operational risk.