Leaf Space, an Italian ground-segment-as-a-service provider, has closed a €20M ($22.1M) Series B as well as an additional €15M ($16.6M) in venture debt through a European Investment Bank loan.
Leaf Space 101
CEO Jonata Puglia and CSO Giovanni Pandolfi founded the company in 2014 to provide an end-to-end, easy-to-use solution for satellite operators to send instructions to space assets and get data back down to Earth.
“The general idea is really to abstract as much as possible the actual burden of handling a satellite network, so that the customer can actually see us as basically a connectivity provider to the aerospace asset,” Pandolfi told Payload.
By the numbers:
- The company has 37 employees worldwide, and is aiming to bump that number up to ~60 by the end of the year.
- It serves ~40 government and commercial customers actively flying satellites across a variety of market segments. A handful of other companies have signed on for ground segment services for when they launch their first sats.
- The network supports ~80 satellites and as many as 10,000 monthly passes.
Enter Europe: The European Investment Bank’s loan to Leaf Space, Puglia said, signals institutional support for space activities in Europe and faith in the company’s ability to consistently produce revenue. The €15M loan will be used to continue developing the GSaaS product and user platform.
Looking forward
With this new influx of cash, Leaf Space is looking to expand its base of ground stations across the world. Right now, the company works with 17 ground stations, but is hoping to deploy an additional eight antennas by the end of the year and get its network up to 50+ total stations by the end of 2024.
Leaf Space is also looking to expand the types of services it can provide its customers. In the coming year, Pandolfi said that the company is hoping to add Ka-band support to the network as well as expand the capabilities of its user platform.
