Open Cosmos raises €300M to build one satellite a day for Europe
Oxford's Open Cosmos has raised €300M, one of Europe's largest space rounds this year, to scale four factories already able to build a satellite a day.
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Founded 2015 · Oxford, United Kingdom
Open Cosmos, the Oxford-based satellite manufacturer and operator, has raised €300 million from a European-led investor group including Lightrock and ETF Partners to expand its satellite factories and scale its constellation, connectivity and data services.
Europe still watches most of the world’s mega-constellations go up on someone else’s rockets, carrying someone else’s payloads – and yet the largest space cheques of 2026 are increasingly being signed in London, Barcelona and Lisbon. Below, I lay out what Open Cosmos announced on Monday, who wrote the cheques, and what a round this size says about where European space is heading.
A European-led table, twenty names long
Open Cosmos announced the €300 million raise on 14 September 2026. The company describes the round as led by European investors, naming Lightrock, ETF Partners, Institut Català de Finances (ICF) and Entrepreneurs First first, alongside two unnamed international pension funds.
The full table runs long: A&G Global Investors, Trill Impact, Phoenix Court (home of LocalGlobe and Latitude), the UK’s National Security Strategic Investment Fund (NSSIF), Convex Group, Santander Alternative Investments, Sankara, Ireon Ventures, Sustainable Forward Capital, Endeavor Catalyst Fund, Iberis Capital, Shilling VC and Amena Ventures all participated, with Claret Capital Partners also at the table. The company itself puts no stage label and no valuation on the round; trade outlet SatNews reports it as a Series C that values the business above $1 billion, with Claret providing a venture debt tranche.
The money goes to expanding satellite mass manufacturing and accelerating three service lines: ConnectedCosmos, a planned Ka-band broadband constellation in low Earth orbit; OpenConstellation, its shared Earth observation infrastructure; and DataCosmos, the platform that turns what the satellites see into something usable. “By bringing together satellites, secure communications and AI-powered data services, we’re creating a system that transforms information from orbit into something governments and enterprises can act on,” said founder and CEO Rafel Jorda Siquier in the announcement.
One satellite a day from four factories
Founded in 2015, Open Cosmos employs close to 400 people across the UK, Spain, Portugal and Greece. The headline capability is industrial rather than orbital: four factories across Europe with the capacity to manufacture one satellite per day, per the company.
The numbers behind the raise are unusually sober for the sector. The company reports five consecutive years of profitable growth and more than $370 million in contracts signed over the past three and a half years, serving European governments, space agencies, and energy and infrastructure companies. A space company raising €300 million on the back of profitability, not promises – that is still rare enough on this continent to be the story in itself.
A $9.35bn market compounding at 28%
The segment Open Cosmos builds for is moving fast. The global small satellite market is projected to grow from $9.35 billion in 2025 to $32.13 billion by 2030, a 28.0% CAGR (MarketsandMarkets, January 2026), driven by low Earth orbit constellations for broadband and Earth observation and by government demand for sovereign intelligence and communications. Capital is following: global space venture investment reached $11.3 billion in the first half of 2026, more than the $10.1 billion invested across all of 2025, per figures cited in the company’s announcement.
Our own records tell the same story at round level. Five days before this announcement, Munich’s The Exploration Company raised $450M in a Series C to fly its Nyx capsule to the ISS; last autumn, Sofia’s EnduroSat raised €95.7M to scale small satellite production. Three of the largest European rounds of the past twelve months are now space hardware – a sentence nobody would have written in 2021.
Pension funds have found the launchpad
So what does this round actually signal? Three things worth watching. First, sovereignty capital is now growth capital: the UK’s NSSIF and Catalonia’s ICF sit in the same round, national security money and regional public money co-investing in the same industrial base. Second, the two unnamed international pension funds matter more than their anonymity suggests – the capital Europe keeps saying it needs to unlock for scale-ups is, in this round at least, unlocked. Third, the geography: a company headquartered in Oxford, manufacturing in Spain and Portugal, hiring in Greece. We are the continent that wrote the rules on satellite data and forgot to own the satellites collecting it – rounds like this one are how that gets corrected.
The good news is that none of this looks like a one-off. Track how the biggest European rounds stack up on our fundraising data desk, and watch whether the pension funds that stepped into orbit this week step into the next industrial round too. Europe does not need to out-launch anyone this decade; it needs to keep building companies that make orbit pay. Open Cosmos just showed what that looks like – let’s build more of them.
