Open Cosmos raises €300M to scale satellite manufacturing across four European factories

UK – Open Cosmos has raised €300M to expand satellite mass manufacturing and build out the connectivity and data services it runs on top of its own constellations, in a round led by European investors.

The round was led by Lightrock with ETF Partners, Institut Català de Finances, Entrepreneurs First and two international pension funds participating. Convex Group, the UK’s National Security Strategic Investment Fund, Phoenix Court and Claret Capital Partners also took part.

Open Cosmos is a European space infrastructure company, founded in 2015 and based at Harwell in Oxfordshire, that designs, builds and operates satellite missions from start to finish. Its platforms, OpenOrbit, ConnectedCosmos, OpenConstellation and DataCosmos, provide governments, institutions and businesses with secure communications, Earth observation and real-time intelligence services.

The number is roughly six times the $50mn it raised in its last round, and the company says it has now delivered five consecutive years of profitable growth on more than $370mn of contracts signed in three and a half years. A profitable European hardware business scaling on customer revenue rather than on promises is rare enough to be the story on its own.

The company says it is capable of manufacturing one satellite a day across four factories, which is a statement about capacity rather than output, and it reports a 100% mission success rate, which is a ratio without a denominator.

The technical result underneath is more concrete. Its next-generation OpenConstellation satellites have cut the delivery of Earth observation intelligence from up to 48 hours to as little as 30 minutes, using onboard AI processing and satellite-to-satellite links rather than waiting for a ground station pass.

Separately, the company designed, built and launched its first ConnectedCosmos satellites within two and a half months of securing Ka-band spectrum filings, which is fast by any standard and very fast for European space. TNW has followed the company since it was launching single satellites for volcano and wildlife monitoring.

The architecture is four parts: OpenOrbit designs, builds, and operates the spacecraft; OpenConstellation lets governments share infrastructure instead of each funding their own; ConnectedCosmos provides sovereign broadband and IoT links; DataCosmos turns the imagery into something operational.

The worked example the company offers is a satellite spotting a temperature anomaly over a forest, classifying it onboard as a probable fire, and relaying that to firefighters directly where terrestrial networks are unavailable.

That last part is where the sovereignty argument stops being abstract. Europe has spent this week arguing about what sovereign infrastructure means, mostly in the context of American suppliers offering local deployment of American systems.

A shared constellation built and operated in Europe, with a UK national security fund among the backers, is a different proposition, and we have covered the company building Greece’s first constellation on exactly that model.

The timing is favourable, and the company knows it. Global venture investment in space reached $11.3bn in the first half of 2026, more than the $10.1bn recorded across the whole of 2025, and European governments have moved from treating satellites as science projects to treating them as critical infrastructure.

Shared-constellation economics are attractive to smaller states precisely because building sovereign capability alone is unaffordable, which is a European argument in a way that Starlink is not.

Rafel Jorda Siquier, the founder and chief executive, argues that infrastructure alone is not the product and that the value is in the intelligence and the connectivity to deliver it.

“Space infrastructure is becoming as critical as energy, digital networks and transport. Governments and enterprises increasingly require secure communications and operational data delivered through resilient systems. But infrastructure alone isn’t enough. The real value comes from the intelligence that relays what’s happening on Earth in real time and the global connectivity to deliver it, said Rafel Jorda Siquier, Founder and CEO of Open Cosmos.

Saul Klein of Phoenix Court put it more bluntly, saying that when European founders are given time and capital to build, Europe can challenge the best in the world. It is the standard line at European funding announcements. This is one of the few cases where the profit and loss account supports it.

“Rafel and the team have spent a decade turning world-class science and engineering into real industrial capability, building a profitable space company that can manufacture satellites at scale and deliver critical sovereign infrastructure. When we give ambitious founders the time and capital to build, Europe can challenge the best in the world, and the proof is right here in Open Cosmos,” said Saul Klein, co-founder and executive chairman of Phoenix Court