The first thing you notice on TRL11's product page is the word Triclops. Not Camera Module 3, not VIS-2200A. Triclops. It is the name of a three-eyed monster from Greek myth, applied to a stereo camera platform meant to ride on a spacecraft and watch another spacecraft drift toward it at closing speeds measured in centimeters per second. The naming tells you something about who runs this company. Nicolaas Verheem spent the last decade in Hollywood, where gear gets named like characters, not SKUs. Now he is selling that gear to the United States Space Force.
TRL11, based in Irvine, California, builds what it calls a Video Intelligence Platform: space-rated cameras, edge compute, network switches, and the software that ties them together so an operator on the ground (or an autonomous system on orbit) can see what a satellite is doing in real time [TRL11 website]. The product line includes the SAVER edge-compute recorder and the TRICLOPS three-camera system [MapQuest, 2026]. The company was founded in 2022 [PitchBook] and raised a $3 million pre-seed round in May 2023, led by Boost VC, with Wonder Ventures, Anorak Ventures, Geek Ventures, Space Cadets, and Launcher founder Max Haot also participating [Tracxn, May 2023].
The bet
Verheem's pitch, in one sentence, is that despite the explosion of satellites in low Earth orbit, only a fraction of them carry video [Orange County Business Journal]. That is a strange fact when you sit with it. We have put thousands of objects in orbit over the last five years. Most of them are blind, or rather, most of them are sensing the world through radio frequency, infrared, or specialized scientific instruments rather than the kind of full-motion video a human pilot would recognize. As the orbital environment gets more crowded and as missions like satellite servicing, debris removal, and proximity inspection become commercially real, the absence of broadcast-quality eyes starts to look like a gap.
TRL11 is filling that gap with hardware engineered for vacuum, radiation, and thermal cycling, plus a software layer that handles the brutal bandwidth constraints of space-to-ground links. The mission areas the company targets are specific: Space Domain Awareness, Rendezvous and Proximity Operations, Docking, alternative position-navigation-timing, and own-ship awareness [TRL11 website]. These are not consumer use cases. They are the operational backbone of how the next decade of orbital activity will actually happen.
Why it could be big
The early validation is unusually concrete for a pre-seed company. In 2024, TRL11 announced a collaboration with Starfish Space, the Seattle-based satellite servicing startup, to use the Triclops three-camera system on RPOD missions [TRL11, Feb 2024]. More recently, TRL11 supplied the onboard camera that Starfish Space used during an autonomous Rendezvous and Proximity Operations mission in low Earth orbit alongside Impulse Space, with the imagery processed for real-time relative position estimates [Impulse Space, 2026]. That is a working flight heritage story, which in the space industry is the difference between a sales conversation and a procurement conversation.
The company is also a member of the Air Force Research Laboratory's Catalyst Accelerator, which placed it directly in front of Space Force end users working on Space Domain Awareness [TRL11 website]. The investor mix reinforces the thesis. Boost VC has been writing space checks for nearly a decade. Anorak Ventures backed Anduril early. Max Haot built and sold Mevo and now runs Launcher (acquired by Vast). These are people who have seen what a category-defining hardware-plus-software space company looks like at the seed stage.
Pre-seed round (May 2023) | 3 | $M
The team
Verheem is the unusual asset here. He founded Teradek in 2008 as a former GE engineer, building wireless video transmission systems that became standard equipment on Hollywood sets [TV Technology, 2026]. Vitec Group PLC acquired Teradek in 2013, and Verheem joined the Vitec Videocom management team, later leading the Creative Solutions division that housed Teradek [Orange County Business Journal, 2026]. The technology won Emmy and Oscar recognition [TRL11 website]. Founders who have already built and sold a video hardware company, then chose to start a second one in a harder physical environment, are a small population. The TRL11 team page lists engineers drawn from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, NASA, and the Space Force [TRL11 website], and the company is currently hiring a Senior Electrical / Electronics Engineer and a Marketing Branding Specialist, among other roles, on Workable.
The honest counterfactual
What bears will say is that defense and space procurement is slow, lumpy, and politically exposed, and that a $3 million pre-seed has to stretch a long way against capital-intensive hardware development cycles. A single program delay or a shift in Space Force priorities can reset a small vendor's revenue plan by a year. What bulls answer is that TRL11 already has flight heritage with Starfish and Impulse, sits inside the AFRL Catalyst pipeline, and is selling into a mission set (RPO, docking, SDA) where customer urgency is increasing rather than decreasing. The company is also not a pure government play: commercial servicing, inspection, and debris-removal startups all need the same eyes, and they are funded by the same venture ecosystem that is now writing checks into orbit.
What to watch
The next twelve months should answer two questions. First, does TRL11 convert its Starfish and Impulse work into a repeat-customer pattern, ideally with a named program of record or a multi-mission commercial contract? Second, does the company raise a seed or Series A on the back of that flight heritage, and at what scale? A round in the $10 to $20 million range, led by a defense-tech specialist, would signal that the thesis has graduated from interesting to inevitable. Watch the AFRL Catalyst cohort announcements and any Space Force SBIR Phase III conversions for early signal.
There is a cultural question buried in all of this, and it is the one TRL11 is implicitly answering: when the orbital economy finally becomes a real economy, who gets to see it happen, and through whose camera?