Open Cosmos has raised 300 million euros to expand its satellite manufacturing and build up the services it offers around the data those satellites collect. The company, which designs and runs small spacecraft, said on September 14 that the money would pay for faster production and a larger team. Lightrock led the round, one of the bigger recent funding events for a European space firm.
The company runs four factories, spread across the United Kingdom, Spain, Portugal and Greece, and says their combined output can reach one satellite a day. Founder and chief executive Rafel Jorda Siquier has built the business around a simple bet: that governments and companies increasingly want their own route to space rather than depending on a handful of large operators for imagery and connectivity.
The new capital supports three strands of work. OpenConstellation lets customers share Earth observation infrastructure instead of each launching a separate fleet. ConnectedCosmos handles broadband links from orbit. DataCosmos applies artificial intelligence to the images and readings the satellites gather. Open Cosmos said its latest spacecraft can cut the gap between capturing information and delivering it from around 48 hours to 30 minutes, using onboard processing and links between satellites.
The round drew a broad set of investors alongside Lightrock, among them the Nordic impact investor Trill Impact, the venture firm Entrepreneurs First, Claret Capital Partners and the UK National Security Strategic Investment Fund, as well as two international pension funds. The blend of private money and state-linked backers reflects how space has come to be seen both as a commercial market and as a matter of national resilience for governments that want secure data of their own.
Open Cosmos said it had signed customer contracts worth 370 million dollars over three and a half years. Demand for frequent, detailed views of the planet has grown as farming, defense, insurance and climate monitoring lean more heavily on satellite data. The war in Ukraine and rising tension elsewhere have sharpened government interest in owning that capability rather than buying it from others. The company said the fresh funding would let it fill those orders while widening the range of services it sells to public and private clients across Europe and beyond.
