Logistics has become a cornerstone of how much we do on Earth — we may order things online, but ultimately we need to move products and ourselves from point A to point B — and some believe logistics models will be even more important on remote space worlds. Now, one startup has secured a major round of funding to capitalize on this opportunity. orbit dan Italian startup that provides a range of logistics services to companies that operate satellites and other services in space, has raised €100 million ($110 million) in a Series C round of equity financing.
The Milan-based company said another $50 million will be added to its Series C in the first half of this year. The current investment is led by a strategic backer, Marubeni Corporation from the Japanese industrial sector, with Avantgarde (a regular investor in the space industry), CDP Venture Capital, Seraphim Space Investment Trust, United Ventures, Indaco Venture Partners, Neva SGR and Primo. Projects are also involved. We understand that the company is valued at approximately $500 million at this round.
This investment is currently one of the largest ever raised by a space technology company in Europe, and follows the company’s acquisition last year of contracts worth around €60 million from space agencies (a key customer segment, representing around half of its total business today), and revenue growth in three figures (but revenue figures were not disclosed).
This is also a beneficial shift for D-Orbit, also registered as a B Corp, after it abandoned its plans last year for a public listing on the Nasdaq in the midst of the IPO market. (That cancellation left some debt, about $20 million, on D-Orbit’s cap table, from bonds it had raised for the listing. The rest of the money it raised was in stocks, CEO Luca Rossettini said.)
Today, D-Orbit provides last-mile satellite delivery and related logistics, mission control as a service to manage already launched spacecraft and hardware, and space waste management services, all aimed at Earth-orbiting launches. Its work is a combination of software and hardware development.
Image credits: orbit d (Opens in a new window) Under license.
Its plan is to continue expanding in all of these areas, and go even further, said Rossettini, who co-founded D-Orbit with COO Renato Panesi.
“Our ultimate goal, the long-term vision, is to connect Mars, the asteroid belt, the Moon and Earth through a logistics network capable of transporting goods, people and information, even if we are still here at the moment,” he said in an interview.
“It’s still here” is meant to be ironic, since what D-Orbit actually does is fairly substantive. Leveraging government space projects as well as the fast-growing commercial space sector, the company said it has already deployed 100 satellites across 13 missions and 42 hosted payloads.
Like logistics companies on Earth themselves, the selling point is that for companies that operate different services – be it communications, weather analyses, industrial monitoring or something else – their core competency lies in delivering their services, not in getting a satellite or satellite. industrial. A sensor on a satellite into space and manages it once it gets there. D-Orbit claims that its scaled delivery and operation model (bundling multiple customers together, and bundled procurement around launches and other services) saves 40% on costs and 85% on time.
D-Orbit competes with a small but equally ambitious field. Other companies in the space services space include Planet Labs, Privateer, Zenno Astronautics, Astroscale, and a variety of others just starting out.
For D-Orbit, both founders are trained as engineers with expertise in space propulsion, flight dynamics and aerodynamics. Their interests, and their awareness of the possibilities as well as the limitations, marry here with some larger market trends.
Improved hardware, more commercial operators like SpaceX conducting regular spacecraft launches, and an abundance of new cloud services are increasing the amount of services built on communications infrastructure in the sky.
This potential — D-Orbit cites a forecast of $1 trillion in revenue by 2030 for the “in-orbit economy” — also comes with a lot of potential pitfalls, of course: expensive equipment, difficult unit economics, and many opportunities for equipment or launches to outer space. fails. This will change the way these companies can operate, and increase future funding: Planet recently announced 10% layoffs to focus on more pressing ROI opportunities.
For D-Orbit, one of the key ROI opportunities it has identified is doubling down on the idea of bringing the circular economy to space technology.
The need here is twofold. The first reason is the public responsibility we have to not fill space with as much waste as our planet. The second reason is a more direct need for work and safety: There is already so much chaos in the sky that we run the risk of some major collisions – costly and dangerous accidents – which could be avoided by cleaning up and removing things that are no longer there. In use.
Today, the company actually offers two ways to decommission satellites, either by helping them disintegrate in the atmosphere (in the case of low-Earth orbit satellites); Or by moving satellites at the end of their lives to ward off other active vehicles by moving them to a “cemetery orbit” 300 kilometers away, Rossettini said. The plan is to build two more areas. First, a company in which D-Orbit connects smaller generators to existing satellites that are running out of power but still have life left in them, to expand their use. Second, a more ambitious idea of how to unload satellites in one place where they could be disassembled with the parts reused in future devices, all done while in orbit.
The latter is currently under development, Rossettini said.
“Aviation is a strategic market in which Italian innovation plays a key role on the international stage,” Agostino Scornagnechi, CEO and managing director of CDP Venture Capital, said in a statement. “D-Orbit exemplifies the distinction it has established itself over these years as a leader in the global in-orbit transportation sector, becoming the world’s first certified B-Corp aerospace company.”