The Coimbra company that tracks 600 satellites just raised €15.6 million
Neuraspace combined €9.6 million of Portugal's recovery-plan money with €6 million of private capital from Lince Capital, Explorer Investments and Armilar. It goes into optical sensors and the defence line, NeuraspaceDEF.
There is a company in Coimbra whose job is to know, at any given moment, where more than 600 satellites are and what is heading towards them. It is called Neuraspace, it started in 2020, and it has just closed a €15.6 million funding round.
The money arrives from two directions. Some €9.6 million comes from Portugal’s Recovery and Resilience Plan; the remaining €6 million is private capital, in a round led by Lince Capital, Explorer Investments and Armilar Venture Partners.
What Neuraspace actually does
Space traffic management and space surveillance, with artificial intelligence doing the heavy lifting. In practice: low Earth orbit is getting badly congested, between working satellites, dead ones, spent rocket stages and fragments from old collisions. Somebody has to work out which of those objects are about to pass dangerously close to each other, and warn operators early enough to move a satellite out of the way. That is the product.
The problem is not abstract. The European Space Agency counts millions of fragments in orbit, from a millimetre upwards, and notes that they travel at roughly ten kilometres per second. At that speed a one-centimetre piece hits with about the energy of a small car at 40 km/h. Most close-approach alerts come to nothing, and that is exactly where the value sits: telling apart the few that do not.
The round funds three things — strengthening the AI platform, expanding the company’s own network of optical sensors, and accelerating NeuraspaceDEF, the line built for government and defence customers. That side has been growing quickly, with contracts that already include the Portuguese Air Force and NATO.
It is worth noticing where half the cheque comes from. This is recovery-plan money landing in a deep-tech company, the kind that usually takes years to pay anything back, and it is precisely the case made by people who argue that Portugal’s startup scene needs less noise and more proof. A Coimbra firm selling orbital surveillance to NATO will do nicely as proof.
By Oliver Grant
Image: NASA Scientific Visualization Studio (public domain)
