Open Cosmos has raised €300 million — roughly $348 million — in a Series C led by Lightrock, crossing a $1 billion valuation and becoming one of the largest space infrastructure rounds Europe has produced.

ETF Partners, Institut Català de Finances, Entrepreneurs First, Convex Group, the National Security Strategic Investment Fund, Phoenix Court and Claret Capital Partners joined, alongside two international pension funds — a signal in itself, since pension capital tends to arrive only once a sector reads as infrastructure rather than speculation.

A satellite a day

Founded in 2015 and headquartered in Oxford, Open Cosmos designs, builds and operates satellites across four factories in the UK, Spain, Portugal and Greece, with roughly 400 employees. Its stated manufacturing capacity is one satellite per day.

The company sells through four platforms — OpenOrbit, OpenConstellation, ConnectedCosmos and DataCosmos — covering secure communications, Earth observation and real-time intelligence for European governments, space agencies and energy and infrastructure operators.

The unusual part: it makes money

Open Cosmos reports five consecutive years of profitable growth, more than $370 million in customer contracts signed over three and a half years, and a 100% mission success rate in orbit to date.

That combination is rare enough in space to be the story. The sector's defining pattern has been enormous capital raised against distant revenue, with a long casualty list of launch and constellation companies that ran out of runway before the contracts arrived. A profitable satellite manufacturer raising at a billion-dollar valuation is a different kind of company being priced on a different kind of evidence.

Why Europe is writing these checks now

"Space infrastructure is becoming as critical as energy, digital networks and transport," said chief executive Rafel Jorda Siquier — a framing that explains both the investor mix and the timing.

European governments have spent the past several years reassessing how much of their communications, observation and intelligence capacity sits on infrastructure they do not own or control. Sovereign capability has moved from a talking point to a procurement line, and a manufacturer with factories in four EU and UK locations is positioned squarely in that shift.

Lightrock partner Ashish Puri said the company is positioned "to become a global leader in this critically important sector."

Where it goes

The money funds expanded mass-manufacturing capacity, faster build-out of the intelligence and connectivity services, and hiring across engineering, manufacturing and software.

The scaling question is whether the margin discipline survives the growth. Profitable at 400 people and four factories is a real achievement; staying profitable while multiplying output to meet government demand cycles is a harder test, and it is the one this round has bought the company the chance to take.

Source

SatNews — "Open Cosmos Reaches $1B Unicorn Valuation Following $348M Series C Round"