Open Cosmos raises $350 million as Europe's space funding accelerates
What's the deal? Open Cosmos, a satellite maker headquartered in Britain, has raised €300 million (about $346 million) from mostly European backers. LightrockDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, a London-based venture capital firm, and ETF PartnersDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → led the round. Participants included Institut Català de FinancesDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, a public development bank in Spain; Entrepreneurs First; and two international pension funds.
What's the endgame? The 11-year-old company plans to expand its satellite manufacturing and accelerate a push into satellite data services. It sells Earth-observation data to governments and businesses, and in March said it would move into orbital connectivity — high-speed broadband and internet-of-things links.
Why now? The climate crisis has driven demand for Open Cosmos's early alerts on floods, wildfires, and other disasters. Last year, it booked roughly $175 million in contracts. Its images of the 2024 Valencia floods and wildfires in Greece were beamed to officials on the ground.
The new funding will help build satellites that process data in space using artificial intelligence, cutting delivery times to minutes from hours. "These are very acute situations where having information when it's needed and where it's needed becomes critical," said founder and chief executive Rafel Jorda Siquier.
The money: Open Cosmos has now raised more than $390 million to date, giving it a valuation of about $2 billion, according to two people with knowledge of the deal.
What could go wrong? Open Cosmos relies on SpaceXDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → and other launch providers to reach orbit, and its move into connectivity puts it in more direct competition with Elon Musk's company. Jorda Siquier concedes the big bottleneck is "launch scarcity."
The signal: The round follows the Exploration Company's $450 million raise, one of Europe's biggest ever — back-to-back nine-figure deals that show European space start-ups can now raise at a scale once reserved for their US rivals. The backer mix is telling: a Spanish public development bank and two international pension funds lined up behind venture leads Lightrock and ETF Partners, a sign that institutional and public money increasingly treats sovereign satellite capacity as strategic infrastructure. Investors are calling it a "SpaceX effect" — Elon Musk's dominance in launch and connectivity is pushing Europe to bankroll homegrown alternatives.
Read more: finanzen.ch, The New York Times
Image credit: Generated with Gemini
