Open Cosmos has closed a €300M ($348.6M) funding round—the latest sign that the European VC landscape is heating up.
The funding round for the European satellite-manufacturing company, announced today, was led by investors on the continent, including participation from Lightrock, ETF Partners, Institut Català de Finances (ICF), and Entrepreneurs First.
“We deliberately wanted strong European representation because we’re building strategic infrastructure in Europe, while also bringing in investors from elsewhere where it made sense,” Open Cosmos cofounder and CEO Rafel Jorda Siquier told Payload via email.
Scale up: Open Cosmos will use the funding to expand its four satellite-manufacturing facilities across Europe to churn out more sats, allowing it to quickly grow its services, including:
- ConnectedCosmos, a secure-comms constellation in LEO;
- OpenConstellation, an EO constellation seeking to provide data to decision-makers within 30 minutes of imagery collection;
- Data Cosmos, a system of high-res sat imagery and visualization tools.
The company also plans to grow its engineering, manufacturing, and software teams based in the UK, Spain, Portugal, and Greece, which collectively employ ~400 people.
Zoom out: European investors have historically been willing to back early-stage startups, but support for companies looking to scale up has lagged behind. In 2025, not a single growth-stage funding round was led by a European private investor, according to a report from the European Space Policy Institute released in May.
But the past week has proved that tide is shifting—The Exploration Company closed a $450M Series C last week, with two of three round leaders hailing from Europe.
“Europe has historically been very good at funding early-stage innovation, but the challenge has been providing the scale-up capital needed to build global technology leaders,” Siquier said. “Seeing multiple significant rounds in European space is a positive sign that this is starting to change.”
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Satellogic is gearing up to launch its latest batch of satellites next month, potentially including the company’s first Merlin sat, which is designed to gather constant 1-m-resolution EO imagery.
Satellogic confirmed the launch of two of its NewSat Mark VI machines—equipped with intersatellite links—and one NewSat Mark V, which is intended to be sold and transferred to a customer while on-orbit, as part of the company’s Sovereign Space Systems program.
Satellogic had previously announced that its first Merlin satellite would launch in October, though the company did not confirm if it would join the three NewSats on the same launch next month.
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