BNP Paribas Fortis Private Equity joins round of financing enabling Aerospacelab to raise €40 million
Belgian satellite manufacturer Aerospacelab has accelerated its next stage of growth with a successful raise of €40 million. The Series B round is co-led by Airbus Ventures and XAnge, a leading European investor in early-stage start-ups. Additional investors in the round include Octave & Miroslaw Klaba, SRIW, Noshaq, Sambrinvest, Belaero and BNP Paribas Fortis Private Equity. Since its inception in 2018, Aerospacelab has raised a total of €60 million.
“2021 was a fantastic year for Aerospacelab, marking the launch of our first satellite and demonstrating the efficacy of our technology in space,” notes Benoît Deper, Founder and CEO of Aerospacelab. “With this round, we are eager to continue to deepen our relationship with one of our earliest investors, XAnge, and thrilled to see Airbus Ventures enter our cap table, collectively confirming our ability to impact the space ecosystem and earn even greater opportunities in the European and global markets.”
Aerospacelab’s constellations are slated to provide real-time content for a wide range of applications, ranging from defence and security, to civil sector applications including environmental, commercial insurance, and economic intelligence. This latest funding will ramp up satellite production capacity, deploy multiple constellations to establish an intra-daily monitoring of the Earth’s surface, and implement geospatial data fusion analytics capabilities.
Supported by an ambitious, vertically integrated approach and dedicated to making geospatial intelligence actionable and affordable, Aerospacelab is powered by proprietary satellite data and enabled by its own satellites.
Since 2018, Aerospacelab has grown substantially, with two offices and over 70 full-time employees, rapidly positioning itself as a leader in geospatial intelligence and small satellites platforms.
“We are thrilled to be one of the new investors in Aerospacelab and in this respect support Belgian tech-entrepreneurship. Just like our bank, Aerospacelab is determined to have a real global positive impact. We strongly believe in their capabilities and are proud that they can play a decisive role in the European space-tech as a Belgian company!,” says Didier Beauvois, Head of Corporate Banking and member of the executive committee of BNP Paribas Fortis.”
