Radar satellite operator Iceye raised $87 million in a Series C spherical introduced Sept. 22, boosting the Finnish startup’s overall funding tally to $152 million.
“We’re grateful to have closed a great round,” Mark Matossian, Iceye US CEO, told SpaceNews. “Now, we can stand on the accelerator.”
With the Series C spherical completed, Iceye is getting ready to release 4 small artificial aperture radar (SAR) satellites in 2020 and “at least eight” in 2021, Matossian said.
In addition, Iceye US has started searching out a U.S. production site. In February, Iceye opened a U.S. office in the San Francisco Bay Area led through Matossian, who controlled a series of aerospace applications at Google which includes the Earth-imaging venture Terra Bella.
Iceye presently operates a constellation of 3 100-kilogram SAR satellites manufactured in Europe. The agency based in 2014 additionally manages a dedicated mission for an unnamed customer.
“This round of investment ensures our SAR satellite constellation will reach a size of at least 12 satellites in 2021, guaranteeing four times a day revisit rate globally,” Rafal Modrzewski, Iceye CEO and co-founder, said in a statement.
“Iceye is growing tremendously and we love their end-to-end approach,” Adam Niewiński, OTB Ventures co-founder and managing partner, told SpaceNews. “They are building the core bus and developing the software and the infrastructure to manage the satellites.”
Iceye “gets thousands of CVs,” Niewiński said. “People prefer to join Iceye rather than traditional government institutions, which used to be the major innovation hubs for space technology.”
While pronouncing its Iceye funding, OTB Ventures additionally unveiled the OTB Space Program I, a brand new fund to again European space technology companies. OTB Space Program I is supported through the European Investment Fund and the European Commission via the European Union Finance for Innovators program referred to as InnovFin.
Prior to the statement OTB Ventures backed Iceye and SpaceKnow, a New York organization that focuses on using artificial intelligence to draw insights from Earth-commentary imagery.
OTB Ventures is organising a brand new space fund because “on the one hand, space technology is a place we apprehend and on the other hand we see amazing momentum for the space industry,” Niewiński said. “We see the industry shifting from a phase of experimentation to earning profits in a real commercialization phase.”
