Starpath Robotics Inc., a startup company in Hawthorne that is developing hardware to do mining on the moon, has raised $12 million in seed funding.

The money came from a group of venture capital investors led by 8VC in Austin and Fusion Fund in Palo Alto, along with Day One Ventures in San Francisco, Balerion Space Ventures in Dallas and Indicator Ventures in Boston.

Co-founded by Chief Executive Saurav Shroff and Chief Technology Officer Mihir Gondhalekar – both of whom are former SpaceX employees – Starpath won $500,000 from NASA in June as part of the Break the Ice Lunar Challenge.

Starpath earned the second-place prize for its four-wheeled rover that can mine, collect and haul material, the space agency said in a release.

“The team…developed a robotic mining tool that features a drum barrel scraping mechanism for breaking into the tough lunar surface. This allows the robot to mine material quickly and robustly without sacrificing energy,” NASA said.

According to a story at Payload, the money allows the company to build out a full-scale terrestrial demonstration of its system and accelerate its path to testing on the Moon.

The company’s planned operational system includes a basketball court-sized solar tower built in partnership with Solestial Inc.; a fleet of rovers designed to harvest regolith within a 20-kilometer radius; and an autonomous thermal processing plant to melt ice, split water into hydrogen and oxygen, and liquefy the oxygen.

Facing significant uncertainty about how water ice detected with space-based sensors is actually distributed on the Moon’s surface, Shroff’s team over-engineered its machines, the Payload story said.

“The robot is designed to mine and haul way more material than it needs, breaking rock that is way harder than expected nominal hardness,” Shroff told the online space publication. “The robot has to be capable of mining thousands or hundreds of thousands of unique sites; we don’t know which site with enough centimeter-level precision is going to have water.”

Zach White, a venture partner at 8VC, told Payload that the firm has invested in other space companies in the past year.

“We’re super excited to back (Shroff), as he exemplifies the type of founder that we love at 8VC – hungrily attacking large problem sets with interesting, novel approaches,” White told Payload.