Open Cosmos Raises €300 Million, Skips the Unicorn Number

Open Cosmos raised €300 million, about $348 million at current exchange rates, in a Series C round led by Lightrock, the British satellite manufacturer said Sept. 14. It is the company's first outside raise since a $50 million Series B in September 2023, when its total funding stood at $57 million.

SpaceNews reported the round makes Open Cosmos Europe's newest space unicorn, worth more than $1 billion. Open Cosmos's own release does not state a valuation anywhere in its text, which means the billion-dollar figure now attached to the company's name in coverage of this round is trade-press arithmetic, not a number the company confirmed.

Who actually wrote the check

The round drew nine named participants: lead investor Lightrock, ETF Partners, the Institut Català de Finances, Entrepreneurs First, Convex Group, the National Security Strategic Investment Fund, Phoenix Court, two international pension funds Open Cosmos did not name, and Claret Capital Partners, which provided a separate venture-debt tranche rather than equity. Founder and chief executive Rafel Jorda Siquier said the money will let the company go "satisfying the satellite manufacturing orders that governments and large companies are placing," language that describes a backlog problem rather than a growth-stage bet on an unproven product.

What close to 400 employees now build

Open Cosmos said it builds one satellite a day across four factories in the UK, Spain, Portugal and Greece, with close to 400 employees. The company said it has signed more than $370 million in customer contracts over the past three and a half years, and that its goal is to cut the time it takes to deliver Earth-observation intelligence from up to 48 hours down to as little as 30 minutes, a claim Open Cosmos's own release makes without naming an independent party that has measured it.

Round	Amount	Announced	Total raised after
Seed	$7 million	undisclosed	$7 million
Series B	$50 million	September 2023	$57 million
Series C	€300 million (~$348 million)	September 2026	~$405 million

The line the government minister drew

UK Space Minister Baroness Lloyd called the round "a major vote of confidence in Open Cosmos and Britain's growing space sector," a government endorsement that arrives as Open Cosmos's contract base leans on public-sector customers: the National Security Strategic Investment Fund, a UK government vehicle, is among the new investors, not just a customer. That overlap between financier and buyer is common in European defense and space rounds through 2026, and it means Open Cosmos's growth is tied to government procurement cycles as much as to open-market demand.

What comes next

Open Cosmos did not say how the €300 million will be split between the four factories, whether the pension funds' participation was in primary shares or a secondary sale, or when it expects to confirm the valuation that trade coverage has already assigned it. The company's next test is operational: whether "one satellite a day" holds up as a sustained manufacturing rate rather than a peak figure, since that claim is what the new contracts depend on being true. Open Cosmos's raise lands in the same stretch of European and Indian space financing as Pixxel's $100 million Series C, though Pixxel's round was explicitly the largest ever for an Indian space company, a superlative Open Cosmos's own announcement does not attempt to match. It also follows Stoke Space's climb to a $10 billion valuation before its first launch, a reminder that in this sector, a company confirming its own valuation is the exception rather than the rule.