NEWSPACE CAPITAL INVESTS IN ICEYE

What is NewSpace Capital?

NewSpace Capital is a Luxembourg-based Private Equity firm with a focus on space and space-related industries. Led by a team with over 100 years of combined industry and investment experience, it combines extensive industry, technology and investment knowledge with reputation and network across the world’s major space markets.

The firm’s goal is to stimulate substantial growth in the space related markets, by investing in opportunities across continents and value chains. NewSpace Capital supports management teams, who demonstrate bold vision, clear strategies and focused execution to deliver solutions to existing challenges and to enable new markets on Earth and beyond.

What is newspace market and why invest in it?

As barriers to access space have reduced over recent years, an ever-increasing number of applications and market segments are enabled by space technologies and applications. These markets include the traditional markets of entertainment and communication. In addition, many other applications such as consumer electronics, transportation, surveillance, agriculture, fisheries, weather forecasting, engineering, healthcare, IT, insurance, banking and finance, resource exploration, mining and emergency services continue to grow thanks to space enabled technologies.

The space market is experiencing unprecedented changes:

• Technical innovation: CubeSats, small and reusable launchers, laser communication, nanoelectronics, 3D printing and other emerging technologies transform existing markets and enable new industries;
• A changing regulatory environment: new legislation enabling commercial space activities breaks down regulatory barriers to the use of space by private companies;
• Growing demand: social and economic changes fuel demand for global access to information, clean energy, new resources and materials;
• Expanding eco-system: the market is expanding beyond traditional telecommunications, GNSS, Earth observation and government activities.

While historically the space market has initially been funded by Government programs and afterwards by large Corporates, the role of Private Equity is increasing in a market which is currently under financed.

NewSpace Capital’s investment policy

The NewSpace Capital Investment strategy is to allocate capital to companies with high growth potential and unique IP. The investment focus is on the supply chain and the companies which serve commercial applications enabled by space technologies.

NewSpace Capital’s first investment

NewSpace Capital announced its first investment by participating in the Series C funding round of ICEYE. Headquartered in Finland with offices in Warsaw, London and San Francisco, ICEYE manufactures and operates its own constellation of satellites to provide high resolution Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery at a high revisit rate on a global scale. ICEYE patented SAR technology delivers radar imagery with enhanced resolution imagery (~25cm level), bringing it close to that provided by optical techniques. However, unlike optical, radar sensing can be performed at night and through layers of clouds which allows it to unlock new and fast-growing market opportunities, such as flood, fire, wind and earthquake monitoring.

Bogdan Gogulan, NewSpace Capital CEO, has commented: “We are very excited to be a major investor in the Iceye Series C Funding round. The transaction fully fits within the NewSpace Capital investment criteria and we are also very pleased to support Iceye’s exciting growth opportunity with our focused space expertise.“

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