Leanspace, the company building the digital infrastructure of the space industry, is announcing the second closing of its Seed round from earlier this year. European Space VC Herius Capital, based in Budapest, Hungary, has joined the original oversubscribed financing round of €6m ($6.4m). Herius joins existing investors Karista and 42CAP, as well as other leading organizations backing Leanspace such as Seraphim Space and Bpifrance.
With its first-of-its-kind cloud platform, Leanspace enables space organizations to leverage state-of-the-art digital technologies to manage their space missions. In an industry that still relies on software tools developed decades ago, and on heavily manual processes to move and share data, digitalization is the key stepping stone towards reaching higher operational efficiency.
Dr. Kornél Szabó Managing Partner of Herius Capital: “We are excited to join LeanSpace on its mission to digitalize the space industry via the cloud as we see modern software tools as critical enabling infrastructure for the space industry. LeanSpace’s excellent team is building such critical software infrastructure with their deep technical and space industry experience; their vision is completely in line with Herius’ view of the future of the sector.”.
Everyone in the space industry is striving to become more agile, lower costs and deliver better service to their customers. Despite this need, many organizations still keep their data in spreadsheets, have teams work in silos and waste time analyzing information manually. The solution comes through the use of cloud-native, integrated software infrastructures and digital technologies, which allow them to drastically improve how they operate.
“In the Space industry we tend to see only the hardware part, but software is now everywhere. As Natya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, said back in 2015, ‘Every company is a software company’, explained Alvaro Alonso Ruiz, co-founder & CCO of Leanspace, “Space organizations use software to design satellites, control test benches, operate assets, derive analytics, produce and distribute products, manage customer relationships… When all your organization’s operations are fueled by software, it is undeniable that your business is a software business. The challenge space companies face is putting in place a modern and comprehensive software strategy across their entire organization.”
Leanspace enables space organizations to implement such a comprehensive software strategy, and adopt new approaches like regaining full in-house control over their software ecosystem, implementing digital continuity across tools and teams, and finding ways to abstract their engineers from the complexity of space software. The result is a drastic increase in agility and reduced costs.
With the Leanspace platform, space companies can digitalize themselves or, for new entrants, be born digital.
About Herius CapitalHerius Capital is a space industry-focused venture capital firm located in Budapest with the mission to strengthen the European NewSpace industry and leverage the growth potential of space-tech companies. As an activist investor, Herius backs the new generation of space entrepreneurs through its industry expertise and widespread network in the space sector.
Learn more at heriuscapital.com
