Notebook
Our Investment in Endurosat's $205 Million Growth Round
Endurosat is making access to space universally accessible.
By Will Dufton
ust a fifteen-minute ride from the airport in Sofia, Bulgaria, is a large, nondescript building next to a sports arena. From the outside, you would never know that you are looking at one of the largest satellite factories globally. The guards stationed out front give you a clue that important work is happening within, but one step inside the lobby of this former bank transports you into another world entirely. A floor-to-ceiling window opposite the reception reveals Endurosat’s new cleanroom, where hundreds of the most sophisticated, cost-effective and reliable satellites will be manufactured this year.
Raycho’s founding vision for Endurosat was to democratise access to space data. Abundant space data means a better understanding of weather systems and the environment, cheaper and faster communications, and novel insights such as monitoring industrial emissions.
Raycho’s vision came to him after a trip to the West Coast of the US, where he had an alarming realisation after meeting dozens of space startups. Space companies were paying fortunes to over-qualified scientists to develop super-bespoke systems for a handful of cost-impervious customers. He set out to make satellites differently. At home in Bulgaria, he would capitalise on an abundance of engineering talent and repurpose it to develop standardised, modular satellite platforms with a laser focus on cost. Today, Endurosat has delivered more than 200 satellites, with 103 satellites already in orbit.
An analogy brings Endurosat’s model to life. Just like TSMC allowed chip designers to focus on design, and stop worrying about manufacturing, Endurosat allows space data companies to stop worrying about hardware and missions. In a virtuous cycle, TSMC has both benefited from and accelerated the appetite for intelligence. We are in the early innings of an industrial revolution in space, and Endurosat sits at the centre of a similar flywheel.
Endurosat has also driven business model innovation in the sector by selling constellations-as-a-service, taking the complexity out of satellite development, launch management and mission operations. Without Endurosat, customers could spend orders of magnitude more on overpowered satellites or, worse, build them from scratch. Now they simply define their data requirements and receive it from orbit in under six months for a transparent annual fee.
As Endurosat drives the cost of transmitting data from orbit to $1 per gigabyte - impossible to imagine a few years ago - space data products will proliferate. For example, Endurosat can drive a seismic shift in the quality of Earth Observation. We still know so little about weather systems and the environment because data was previously so capital-intensive to acquire. With Endurosat, we can now measure what matters.
Driving costs down is also critical for space sovereignty. Even in the past few months, we have seen nations cut off from critical communications and imaging services they do not control. Endurosat makes it possible for every country and company to be masters of their own destiny in space.
European space sovereignty had a big moment a couple of weeks ago when Isar Aerospace became the first private European company to launch a rocket into orbit and successfully deployed a payload that included an Endurosat satellite. This is just the beginning for European space.
We published our thesis on space almost exactly one year ago. We set out to find the emergent high-value application layers of space, now that the “railroads” to the frontier had been built out. We knew immediately that Endurosat had the potential to be one of space’s biggest winners, and so we are very excited to announce today that Giant Ventures is investing in Endurosat as part of its $205 million growth round, co-led by Riot Ventures and Atreides Management.
Moreover, we are honoured to partner with Raycho and his team. They are execution machines whose ambition knows no bounds. 12 years ago, it would have been hard to imagine that Raycho could steer a small cubesat builder operating from of a single room in Bulgaria into one of the most experienced satellite operators globally, but they did. Now Raycho’s sights are set on an even bigger goal: to define the next era of the space economy and dominate for decades. No case study of their seriousness and intent speaks louder than the agreement they just signed with the Bulgarian government to convert a 3 million m² ex-military airport into one of the largest satellite R&D and production facilities in the world, with satellites flying out to customers directly from its private airstrip.
As Raycho would say, ‘Ad Astra!’
