Open Cosmos raises €300m to scale satellite output
What happened
Open Cosmos raised a €300m ($349m) funding round on September 14, led by Lightrock and ETF Partners with participation from the UK's National Security Strategic Investment Fund. The money will expand satellite mass-manufacturing across four factories in the UK, Spain, Portugal and Greece. It will also grow the company's ConnectedCosmos and DataCosmos data services. Founded in 2014, Open Cosmos has now raised more than $390m in total and says it builds at a rate of one satellite per day. The round is one of Europe's largest space deals this year, days after Open Cosmos's UK TacSys tactical-communications certification.
Read-across for SES
Open Cosmos is a UK sovereign-space vendor SES and GovSat do not touch, and it already builds satellites for the UK's TacSys framework. A fully funded, four-factory manufacturing base makes Open Cosmos a more credible bidder against SES for future European and UK sovereign-connectivity work. The two compete in different segments today: Open Cosmos in smallsats and applications, SES in MEO and GEO broadband.
As the brief filed it
[AGE: 2h] Open Cosmos raised a €300m funding round to expand satellite manufacturing across four European factories, taking its total funding since 2014 past $390m.