He Tried to Mine Asteroids. He Ended Up Photographing Spy Satellites Instead.

The panel's question was a familiar piece of startup mythology: do the founders who build the biggest things need to be a little damaged to do it? One of the investors on the panel made the cynical version of the case — that venture capital quietly rewards a certain kind of childhood chip on the shoulder, because it's a reliable predictor of relentlessness.

HJ — Dr Hiranya Jayakody, co-founder of the satellite-imaging company HEO — didn't argue the theory so much as sidestep it entirely. "I had a pretty good childhood," he said. Then, almost as an aside: "And then you reflect on that and go, how am I alive? Because I grew up in Sri Lanka — there was a war, there was a tsunami, there was a lot going on. It was risky sometimes."

An elephant, a tsunami, and a family that got lucky

He tells the story lightly, without much of the weight the subject matter would usually carry. His family was heading toward the beach the day the 2004 tsunami hit — they lived roughly two kilometres from the ocean — when an elephant wandered into the street and blocked traffic for about forty-five minutes. His mother still believes the elephant saved them. Sri Lanka's civil war ran for roughly three decades in the background of his childhood. Talking about it with a cousin years later, comparing notes on a young relative's reaction to a frightening incident, the two of them realised something about their own upbringing: "We lived through war and people died every day, and we'd kind of become numb to that," he says — and then, catching himself, adds that it's not something he wants to pass on: "Let's make sure our kids are more sensitive."

His point isn't that the hardship made him special. It's closer to the opposite: it reset his baseline for what counts as adversity. Someone raising their voice at him in a meeting doesn't register as a crisis. "I'm alive," is roughly the whole response.

From asteroid mining to a satellite that photographs other satellites

HJ met his co-founder Will Crowe in 2015 through a mutual friend, while both were doing PhDs at UNSW — HJ in robotics. Will's original idea was small satellites chasing down asteroids, a first step toward mining them for rocket fuel to enable deeper space travel. They spent a few years chasing that, without really knowing how to run a startup, before concluding by around 2018 that asteroid mining was simply too early for the technology available.

What survived the pivot was the underlying idea: small cameras in space. That drew unsolicited interest from defence, intelligence and commercial customers who wanted one satellite able to monitor another — a category HJ calls "non-Earth imaging," taking a photo of a satellite in orbit from a different satellite, at closing speeds that can reach fifteen kilometres a second. "It's like ultra Formula 1 photography," he says. Rather than building their own cameras first, they started by renting time on other companies' existing, often idle, Earth-observation satellites — pointing hardware built for something else at a new kind of target.

The photo that got a call from a US regulator

To prove the concept was benign, HEO photographed the International Space Station — about as public and unmilitary an object as exists in orbit. In the United States, imaging another country's satellite from your own had effectively only ever been done classified, and commercial versions of it sat in genuinely uncertain legal territory. HEO shot the ISS photo during a COVID lockdown. HJ remembers being in the room when the image came through. A day later, his co-founder Will got a phone call from a US regulatory body, asking, in effect, what they'd done and whether they'd broken the law.

What followed wasn't a shutdown — it became something closer to a working relationship. HEO was operating entirely from Australia, outside US jurisdiction, and Australia at the time had no regulatory framework covering the activity at all. "We became actually friends," HJ says, "because they were like, this is an interesting regulatory thing — outside US jurisdiction." The absence of an Australian rulebook, usually a liability story, worked in their favour.

Where it's landed

HEO now has ground teams working in Washington DC inside the US intelligence and imaging community, a London presence covering European activity, and is opening a Japan office after three years of work with the Japanese government. HJ describes revenue doubling or tripling year over year. The original asteroid-mining ambition hasn't been dropped — when Will introduces the company to new people, he still adds, half-joking, that they're eventually going to mine asteroids. HJ's answer to why he lets that stand: "the technology we're building right now is pretty much foundational to the asteroid goal." The satellites got smaller and the customers changed completely. The original problem never actually left the room.