Open Cosmos' €300M Round Turns Satellite Manufacturing Into an Asset Class

Rafel Jorda Siquier started Open Cosmos in 2015 out of Entrepreneur First, the London program that hands founders a stipend and a desk. He had spent years in European space-mission design, and he carried one complaint with him the whole way: the continent could design world-class spacecraft, but it could not build them in volume.

On 14 September the company he built to answer that complaint announced a €300 million round — $348 million — at a valuation above $1 billion. It closed partly from Harwell, the Oxfordshire campus where its largest factory sits, and it closed largely with European money.

The headline is the €300 million. The operating number matters more: four factories, across the UK, Spain, Portugal and Greece, running at a stated capacity of one satellite per day.

The arc in one line

TIMELINE: Open Cosmos, 2015 → 2026
─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
  2015 ───── 2017 ───── 2023 ───── 2024–26 ───── ◉ NOW ───── 🔥 NEXT
  🧪         💰         🏭         🏭            💰          🛰
  Founded    Series A   Series B   Four EU       €300M      ConnectedCosmos
  Entr. First                     factories     Series C   Ka-band LEO
─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
Source: company statements, SpaceNews, ETF Partners, 2026

The factory that builds a satellite a day

A satellite used to be a bespoke object. A team of engineers spent years on a single bus, tested it to destruction, and handed it to a launch provider as a one-off. The economics were those of a prototype shop.

The company reorganized the work around repetition. Its OpenOrbit division designs, builds and operates the spacecraft; the four plants assemble them on production lines that borrow more from automotive tooling than from a clean-room laboratory. The company says the line can now turn out one satellite per day and that every unit it has launched has worked in orbit.

That claim is worth testing against how the rest of the sector behaves. Constellation builders typically buy satellites from contractors and wait. It wants to own the throughput and then sell it, either as a finished mission or as capacity on a shared one.

The customer list explains why the capital came. European governments, national space agencies, and large energy and infrastructure operators now buy satellites the way utilities buy transformers — as standardized inputs to a service. They want images and connectivity on a schedule, not a spacecraft on a pedestal.

Why a profitable manufacturer is the rare asset

Most European space startups sell a story about a future constellation and raise against it. The money arrives years before revenue, and the valuation rests on projected capacity. The manufacturer inverted the sequence: contracts first, manufacturing second, constellation third.

As we wrote in September, satellite manufacturing across Europe was already racing to catch constellation demand. What that race produced, until this month, was capacity announcements and unbuilt constellations. This round is one of the first where the capacity is already running and the balance sheet is already positive.

The investor register carries the same signal in a different form. ETF Partners and Lightrock co-led, with a venture-debt tranche from Claret Capital Partners. The new names include the UK's National Security Strategic Investment Fund, Catalonia's Institut Català de Finances, Convex Group, Phoenix Court, and two international pension funds.

Pension capital entering a hard-tech manufacturer is the part to watch. It arrives late, when a company already has the shape of infrastructure. Two international pension funds in a satellite factory is the clearest sign yet that European space has crossed from venture speculation into an allocable asset class.

From pictures to pipes: the spectrum move

The funding also moves the company past Earth observation and into communications. Its ConnectedCosmos program plans a sovereign Ka-band constellation in low Earth orbit (LEO), aimed at governments that want secure broadband they control.

On the observation side, the pitch is speed. OpenConstellation, the company's shared satellite network, is designed to cut the delivery time for Earth-observation (EO) intelligence from up to 48 hours to roughly 30 minutes, using on-board processing and satellite-to-satellite links. The company launched the next-generation satellites for that network in 2026, alongside national missions such as Greece's Hyperion GR1.

Combining imagery and connectivity in one platform is a deliberate choice. A government that buys pictures from one vendor and bandwidth from another owns two contracts and two integration problems. It is selling the bundle.

How the model compares

Company statements and press reporting, September 2026

What the €300 million does not fix

Two constraints sit outside the round. The first is launch. Europe reached orbit with a commercial rocket only this month, when Isar Aerospace flew successfully on 13 September, and launch capacity remains the sector's tightest constraint. A factory that builds a satellite a day still needs a ride for each one.

The second is the customer. Sovereign demand is real but concentrated: a handful of national budgets, moving at the speed of procurement cycles. A €300 million round buys runway and factories. It does not buy a second, third and fourth anchor customer, and the model only compounds if those arrive.

The competitive field is filling in fast. IRIS², Europe's €15.6 billion sovereign constellation, advanced the same week. The Exploration Company raised $450 million for reentry vehicles days earlier. Global space venture funding reached $11.3 billion in the first half of 2026, already above the $10.1 billion for all of 2025, according to PitchBook — and Europe, which supplied only €1.4 billion of private capital to space firms in 2025, is now competing for that flow rather than watching it.

Turning points to track

Watch three numbers. First, the share of revenue from multi-year service contracts rather than one-off spacecraft — the difference between a manufacturer and an infrastructure operator. Second, the first batch of ConnectedCosmos satellites actually in orbit, which converts a spectrum filing into a service. Third, whether the pension funds follow this cheque with another, or treat it as a single, opportunistic allocation.

The same bet, larger

What happened on 14 September goes beyond one startup raising money. A European satellite manufacturer showed three things at once: it can build at volume, it can sell to governments on commercial terms, and it can stay profitable while doing both. The €300 million is the market repricing those three facts.

Jorda Siquier's 2015 complaint was that Europe could design spacecraft but not build them at scale. Eleven years on, the factory line answers the design half. The launch pad, and the procurement calendar, will decide the rest.