Charter Space brings fintech to spacecraft insurance and shows off its stuff at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025

When Yuk Chi Chan started construction Charter space In late 2021, it was after a long period of pain.

As a mission manager at a satellite bus startup, he coordinated the company’s first demonstration mission—and he had to do it all using critical data spread across Microsoft Excel.

In addition to managing internal engineering operations, Chan, a former aerospace lawyer, had to repackage the same critical engineering and program data for different external audiences.

“It was all the same data. It was all about the same physical thing,” he told TechCrunch. “I felt like this is crazy… Why wouldn’t I be able to have some kind of unified interface, or some kind of unified data model, that represents this thing correctly for anyone looking at it?”

This prompted him to establish the Charter. Chan described the company less as a development tool for aerospace engineers (although it’s used that way), and more of an aerospace fintech company. The software captures manufacturing and testing data directly from the source, and this data set then feeds an underwriting interface that links directly to the six largest insurers in the market.

The charter space is A The emerging battlefield Top 20 finalists in TechCrunch disabled 2025which continues this week in San Francisco.

The goal is to assess spacecraft insurance risks faster, cheaper, and more reliably, and ultimately power new forms of credit and non-dilutive financing for space companies looking outside venture capital and public markets.

“The biggest technical risk we had to take away was actually starting to develop this underwriting model and start understanding what the most important things are, how they should be weighted, and really start layering that risk analytics piece on top of all the data we already collected,” Chan said.

He noted that small satellites often fail within their first 90 days in orbit due to some internal technical glitch, a pattern the company is trying to capture and price.

Spacecraft insurance is rare. Of the nearly 13,000 satellites in orbit, fewer than 300 are insured, Chan said. Unlike other insurance products, the problem is not fraud or misaligned incentives; Rather, it is simply the cost of underwriting itself.

Today, operators compile a set of technical documentation, submit it to an intermediary, and then wait several months for this data to be assimilated by the technical guarantor. That time shows up in premiums: “I’ve heard people get rates as high as 80%,” Chan said.

The charter aims to reduce these costs by providing a complete picture of all technical details so that underwriters do not spend months assessing a single risk. Instead, more assets can be insured, which means more risk can be accumulated and the market becomes healthier overall.

“We want to insure more satellites, because that means everything as a whole is safer,” Chan said. “If we can spread insurance coverage, that’s good for the space industrial base, and a lot more companies will have a safety net… but it’s also healthier for the economy as a whole, because that encourages global investment from different alternative sources of capital.” “You’re not just relying on venture capital or some growth stocks. You can start bringing in debt and credit and a lot of different options that you have in any other type of developed industry.”

The charter tool already exists with companies and universities; It also has a lighter product for customers who just want to take advantage of the insurance benefits, rather than the full suite of engineering management features.

The company also announced at TechCrunch Disrupt the acquisition of… plover Parametersa Y Combinator-backed insurance company originally focused on climate parametric products. It’s a move Chan says will allow Charter to provide a “white glove” service by setting policies directly, rather than relying on middlemen.

The bigger picture is opening up cheaper sources of capital for space companies. If underwriting becomes more standardized, this paves the way for more financing options.

“We need to bring in banks, we need to bring in lenders, because that is a more efficient source of capital, both from a cost of capital and from an incentives standpoint,” Chan said.

If you want to learn more about Charter Space from the company itself — while also checking out dozens of other companies, hearing their ideas, and hearing from guest speakers on four different stages — join us at Disrupt, Monday through Wednesday, in San Francisco. Learn more here.