Harwell-based Open Cosmos has raised €300m in a round led by Lightrock, roughly six times the $50m it took in its previous raise, with the UK's National Security Strategic Investment Fund and Phoenix Court among the backers joining the register.
Open Cosmos was founded in 2015 by chief executive Rafel Jorda Siquier and is headquartered at the Harwell science campus in Oxfordshire. It designs, builds and operates satellite missions end to end, and sells the data that comes off them to governments, space agencies and corporate buyers.
The business is organised across four lines. OpenOrbit covers spacecraft design, manufacture and operation. OpenConstellation lets governments share satellite infrastructure rather than each funding a constellation alone. ConnectedCosmos provides broadband and IoT links between satellites, orbit and the ground. DataCosmos turns imagery and sensor readings into near-real-time intelligence.
Lightrock led the €300m round. ETF Partners, Institut Català de Finances, Entrepreneurs First and two international pension funds participated, among them British Columbia Investment Management Corporation. Convex Group, the UK government's National Security Strategic Investment Fund, Phoenix Court — the home of LocalGlobe and Latitude — and Claret Capital Partners also took part.
The company did not disclose the round's stage, a post-money valuation or the resulting dilution. On the numbers it has released, the raise is roughly six times the $50m it banked in its last round.
The financial position behind the cheque is unusual for European hardware. Open Cosmos says it has delivered five consecutive years of profitable growth and has signed more than $370m of contracts in the past three and a half years, meaning the business has been scaling on customer revenue rather than on successive equity injections.
Capital will go towards expanding ConnectedCosmos, growing OpenConstellation and DataCosmos, and lifting manufacturing capacity. The company operates four factories across Europe and puts its theoretical capacity at one satellite per day. It employs close to 400 people across the UK, Spain, Portugal and Greece, and plans to add engineering, manufacturing and software staff in each.
On the technical side, Open Cosmos says its next-generation OpenConstellation satellites have cut the delivery of Earth observation intelligence from as long as 48 hours to as little as 30 minutes, using onboard processing and satellite-to-satellite links instead of waiting for a ground station pass.
The timing reflects a wider repricing of the sector. Global venture investment in space reached $11.3bn in the first half of 2026, ahead of the $10.1bn recorded across the whole of 2025, according to figures cited by the company.
Original source: Tech.eu
