A Portuguese startup just raised €15.6M ($18M) to build the traffic system for a highway that didn't exist a decade ago. Neuraspace, based in Coimbra, monitors 600+ satellites for operators, space agencies and two branches of a national military , and it plans to add radar to its telescope network with this round.
The money buys three things: radar sensing added to an optical telescope network, the NeuraspaceDEF defence platform, and an AI workforce for autonomous orbit management.
The company reports 350%+ YoY revenue growth, and has been named prime contractor by a European defence ministry for an announcement planned in September.
The reason: orbit is now contested, not just crowded
Low Earth orbit holds two problems that used to be solved by separate bureaucracies. Collisions between spacecraft , now a weekly event in the tens of thousands of tracked objects. And deliberate interference: GNSS spoofing, jamming, RF interference and counterspace activity targeting the satellites themselves. Neuraspace CEO Chiara Manfletti frames the two as one operational problem:
Today, protecting satellites means addressing both accidental risks and intentional threats. Safety and security are no longer separate challenges,they are two sides of the same operational problem., Chiara Manfletti, CEO, Neuraspace
That framing explains why the round is split the way it is. A commercial traffic-management product (€6M from venture firms) and a sovereign defence capability (€9.6M from the EU-backed PRRP plan). Investors in the private portion are betting on both halves.
Space traffic management is a small market growing quickly: $2.52B in 2024, forecast to $7.41B by 2035 at a 10.29% CAGR, per Market Research Future. The tension between the two revenue streams , defence ministries pay for resilience, commercial operators pay for throughput , is where the business stands.
What the money buys
Neuraspace's core is a software platform that fuses data from public catalogs, ground-based telescope partners and its own optical sensors. The software produces near-real-time orbit determination, collision alerts and manoeuvre guidance. The funding extends that stack in three directions.
First, radar. Optical telescopes have a blind spot: they track objects at night and in good weather, and they lose objects in certain orbits. Radar adds an independent sensing band. For a platform that sells "always-on awareness," a second sensor type is the difference between a dashboard and an air-traffic control centre.
Second, autonomy. The company plans to push autonomous decision-making, explainable AI, sensor fusion and anomaly detection , the "explainable" part matters for defence customers who need to justify actions to regulators and accountability boards, and for operators who fly systems with rising autonomy.
Third, the defence product line. NeuraspaceDEF is the dual-use platform for government and defence users. It doesn't just send collision warnings; it surfaces autonomous risk and threat assessments that combine physical and cyber threat signals. The company was recently chosen as prime contractor by a European defence ministry , details are scheduled for September.
The customer base changes the valuation story
Neuraspace lists civil institutions and commercial operators among its clients: ESA, Spire Global, NanoAvionics, Sidus Space, GEOSAT and U-Space, alongside the Portuguese Air Force and NATO. Revenue grew more than 350% year over year, according to the company's own figures.
For a principal evaluating the round, the mix matters. Commercial operators offer recurring software revenue with scale. Defence and institutional contracts offer stickier, longer-framed revenue with higher compliance overhead. The company has both, which de-risks the capital-intensity question that typically kills space software upstarts: hardware you own (telescopes, now radar) plus software you sell.
Lince Capital's CEO Vasco Pereira Coutinho called Neuraspace "one of Europe's most promising space technology companies" , standard investor language, but the public-private funding structure is unusual enough to check twice.
Positioning: Europe's answer to the US playbook
The most mature space domain awareness players are American. The growth of Europe's sovereign space ambitions , Galileo, Copernicus, the EU IRIS² constellation , creates a demand profile that US-focused vendors serve less well: EU procurement rules, European defence standards, and a preference for a prime contractor inside the bloc.
Neuraspace's optics-plus-radar sensor network and its defence ministry mandate put it in this niche. It is not a "European version of a US product"; it's a European prime-subcontractor path that US vendors can't easily walk.
The offset is regulatory. EU programmes (IRIS² procurement, EU SST) set the funding cadence, and public money in the cap table means public priorities in the roadmap. Investors accept that trade when the contract sizes compensate.
Investment read
Three numbers anchor the analysis. €15.6M raised , modest for a company with sovereign ambitions, which suggests strong discipline rather than weak traction. 350%+ revenue growth , the tell that the software half of the business works. 600+ satellites monitored , the scale that makes the sensor network defensible.
The risks are equally specific. A September announcement could disappoint. The radar build-out carries hardware execution risk. And the collision-avoidance market's willingness to pay for alerts, rather than for insurance-derived value, remains unproven at scale , no operator has yet priced traffic management the way airlines price air traffic control.
Operator-by-operator, the comparison holds up better than it sounds. A constellation the size of Spire's or Sidus's runs hundreds of spacecraft with limited ground-control bandwidth; an automated alert-and-advisory layer reduces the human minutes spent deciding whether a conjunction is worth a burn. That is a throughput argument, not a fear argument . And throughput-based software pricing is the pattern that made the US SDA vendors viable in the first place.
European defence ministry prime-contract announcement , expected September 2026
First radar stations added to the optical network , hardware milestone within 12 months
Satellite count monitored: does the 600+ base grow past 1,200 within a year?
Repeat commercial renewals from Spire Global, NanoAvionics, Sidus Space and ESA
Will the round reveal its value within a year?
Probability: 65% , the September announcement was already confirmed; a second mandate follows the pattern of Portugal's 2022 PRRP track record and the growing European SST funding pool.
✅ Arguments for
European demand for sovereign SDA is rising with IRIS² and EU SST budgets.
Defence software primes in the EU historically chain follow-on mandates.
Confirmation criteria: named ministry by Q1 2027 and radar live in the network.
❌ Arguments against
Public funding (€9.6M of €15.6M) makes the roadmap hostage to PRRP programme priorities.
The contested segment could consolidate around US vendors before European primes scale.
Disconfirmation criteria: no announcement by Q2 2027 and commercial growth below 150%.
Development scenarios
🟢 Optimistic scenario (35%)
Implications: Neuraspace becomes a reference prime for European SDA; a Series C would likely arrive with a far larger sovereign backlog attached.
🟡 Base-case scenario (45%)
Implications: A steady, state-anchored scale-up with public-private funding continuing , slowly moving toward the top of the European SDA leaderboard.
🔴 Pessimistic scenario (20%)
Implications: Neuraspace stays a successful niche software vendor and becomes a takeover target for a larger European defence player; the round's public half limits downside but also limits upside.
The short version for a principal: a €15.6M round buys a defensible European position in space traffic management, with a confirmed sovereign contract pipeline and a revenue curve worth checking at the September announcement. Worth tracking the radar milestone , it's the difference between a software vendor and an infrastructure asset.
