Launched in 2014, the Italian-headquartered company currently supports around 80 satellites and achieved for the first time this March more than 10,000 successful satellite passes during a single month. Since 2020, it has seen a three-fold year-over-year increase in core business revenue and significant growth in capacity demand.
The round was subscribed by lead investors CDP Venture Capital and Neva, alongside SIMEST and Digital Transition Fund - part of the CDP group. The existing shareholders RedSeed Ventures, Primo Space, and Whysol Investments, all contributed to the funding round, which builds on the success of a previous initiative three years ago. Furthermore, the European Investment Bank (EIB) has committed an additional €15 million in Venture Debt to the company - the transaction is in its finalisation stage.
“The secured funding underscores the confidence in Leaf Space's capabilities and the company's potential for continued growth,” said Jonata Puglia, Leaf Space CEO and co- founder. “It further validates our success and market position as the second largest Ground Segment-as-a-Service (GSaaS) operator in the world.
“This funding will enable us to further expand our global network of ground stations as well as add several new locations worldwide. We also plan to support new frequencies for remote sensing satellites, continue simplifying the user experience of our services, hire new talent to scale up our activities, and proactively work on new segments of the market and special projects with customers and partners”.
Giovanni Pandolfi Bortoletto, CSO & co-founder, said, “Within the next 10 years, we want to empower a future where spacecraft - regardless of their mission, application, orbit or deep space destination - are seamlessly serviceable and integrated to a plug-and-play (PnP) connectivity service.
“We are progressing towards efficient, fully automated, and ubiquitous communications with satellites, which will facilitate the ongoing and sustainable expansion of the space ecosystem.
“In this context, Leaf Space facilitates such communications with space infrastructures through its automatic scheduler - the proprietary algorithm on which Network Cloud Engine and a distributed antenna network are based - and lays the foundation for new ones not possible yet today”.
Leaf Space’s ground segment services are used to manage satellite communications, data downlink and uplink operations for satellite operators globally.
