By Jeff Foust 

Rendezvous Robotics announced Sept. 10 it raised $3 million in a pre-seed round led by Aurelia Foundry and 8090 Industries, with participation from several other funds and angel investors.

The company, based in Golden, Colorado, plans to commercialize a technology developed at the MIT Media Lab called Tessellated Electromagnetic Space Structures for the Exploration of Reconfigurable, Adaptive Environments, or TESSERAE. The technology involves tiles that can self-assemble and reconfigure themselves, creating large structures.

“It’s time to profoundly scale up our ambitions in orbit. We’re launching a new paradigm for in-space construction,” said Ariel Ekblaw, who invented the technology at MIT and is a co-founder of Rendezvous Robotics, in a statement.

The TESSERAE technology, developed at MIT and later supported by Ekblaw’s Aurelia Institute, has gone through several rounds of testing, including on parabolic aircraft flights that provide brief periods of microgravity and on a New Shepard suborbital flight. It has also been tested twice on the International Space Station.

“We’re on the fifth generation of that TESSERAE technology now,” said Joe Landon, co-founder and president of Rendezvous Robotics, in an interview. That latest version will go to the ISS in early 2026 for more tests, seeing how a set of 32 tiles, each the size of a dinner plate, can self-assemble into an enclosed structure within the station. That will be followed by a test of the technology in space.