The European space ecosystem funds top research, makes and opens extremely valuable data, trains top scientists and engineers … then buys the finished capability from abroad, often with European roots. What can break this pattern is to copy what works elsewhere: crowd in public customers to de-risk dependable home-market demand (not supply). Growth investment will follow, and so will the benefits.
Ljubljana — Sinergise’s hometown — as seen by Copernicus Sentinel-2: the open data a small Slovenian team turned into a product the world used. Contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2020), processed by ESA (CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO).
In 2023 a Slovenian company called Sinergise was acquired by US-listed Planet Labs. If you then pulled a Copernicus satellite image without wrestling raw files, chances are it came through Sentinel Hub, the portal Sinergise built. Europe paid for the satellites and to grow their business. Europe opened the data to everyone. A small and mighty Slovenian team turned that openness into a product the world actually used. An American company — a provider of its own commercial satellite data — bought them and folded Sentinel Hub into its own offering.
Nobody in that story did anything wrong. Planet made a sound acquisition; the founders proved you can invent from Europe, and they earned their exit; no data policy or law was broken. But it’s equally clear Europe couldn’t keep what it created, at the very moment it was becoming a global leader.
I was inside the pattern at the same time. While Sinergise grew toward its exit, I was at Microsoft, directing the creation and release of the Planetary Computer, a petabyte-scale global data platform. It ran on open data (including major EU-funded holdings like Copernicus Sentinel imagery) and on open-source tools like Pangeo, which the UK Met Office helped build from its earliest days. Since 2011 my work has been moving Earth observation from research into use, but it didn’t escape me that the two hottest Earth-observation platforms of the moment were American, with deep European roots.
The European Space Policy Institute’s latest Space Venture report finds that in 2025 not one European private investor led a growth-stage funding round for a European space scale-up. Nine such rounds closed that year: five were led by European public entities (a stopgap, hopefully), and the four anchored by private capital were all led by US firms. This is the valley of death, and it has moved downstream: our companies incubate and accelerate on grants and early contracts, and leave when they reach the growth round — the moment that decides where a firm scales, hires and lists.
This is incredibly timely, if not late. In June 2026 SpaceX completed the largest IPO in history: the whole company, Starlink included, listed on Nasdaq at about $1.77 trillion — roughly 95 times its 2025 revenue, a price that assumes decades of growth already baked in. The same month, Rocket Lab agreed to acquire Iridium for about $8 billion, roughly nine times Iridium’s 2025 revenue. That is the scale of private-market appetite for space. What multiples can European space companies command to attract that investment?
What could a public space agency do about capital markets? It cannot force growth capital, and I don’t think it should lead it either, if we want to diversify our finance mechanisms. But it can de-risk future demand: directly through contracts, indirectly through the rules of the game. A growth round is led by whoever believes the revenue plans and the environment they will play in. A committed public customer is the strongest answer to both. ESA’s most recent reorganisation points the same way: one directorate now concentrates the demand and partnership levers — ARTES, the launcher challenge, ACCESS — and reaches, through its network of partners, one of the world’s largest single markets. ESA can organise the demand, coordinate, incubate, and certify the supply base. European Union partners like the European Commission and Parliament can aggregate Europe-wide demand and set the rules that allow investor confidence. Think EU-Inc, the founder-driven push that in March 2026 became the Commission’s proposal for a single pan-European company form.
Where should committed demand point? Connectivity comes first: it is the vertical finance watches most closely, and it backs the current call for secure and sovereign communication links for governments and institutions. Close behind, the in-space economy: cargo and in-orbit services. Private capital in European markets will only come in full force once a credible public customer exists and the rules are clear. Security, the evolving defence posture and dual use are obvious verticals; they can help de-risk the commercial and sovereign layer while keeping ESA’s civil charter fully intact.
The mechanism itself is not new. ESA has indeed piloted it with ClearSpace. The agency signed as an anchor customer before the capability was fully built, and that contract let a young firm raise private capital. It is the instrument the growth round is missing, and it should become the standard way the agency buys what industry can sell next. Two disciplines keep it honest. Buy hard: fixed prices, real milestones, competed awards, and the will to walk away when a firm doesn’t deliver. And buy reusable: write into the demand spec that what is built must serve a long tail of customers — open interfaces, standing services, no bespoke one-off systems — so the public buyer is the first customer of a product, never the only customer of a project.
None of this touches the promise at ESA’s heart. Geographic return is how member states come together knowing their contributions come home as contracts, capability and jobs; it built national space sectors where none existed, and while contentious, there are many practical reasons to defend it. The task is to modernise the instrument so the promise is rooted in commercial demand, not only supply. The downside of demand anchoring is that it is future-dependent, which can create short-term imbalances in geo-return; supply anchoring is more present-based, with firmer geo-return guarantees. The upside is a larger pie, with bigger returns to allocate. A backstop can help defuse downsides: no member state’s guaranteed share falls. Supporting supply helped create Sinergise; de-risking European demand might have kept it.
The resources exist. At the ministerial last November, member states subscribed more than €22 billion (up about 32% on 2022, the largest commitment in ESA’s history), and Strategy 2040 already names competitiveness and resilience among the agency’s goals. Europe won’t win by out-launching anyone soon. Our edge is the whole value chain — skills, spacecraft, ground segment, data, applications, a large single market — with Copernicus staying full, free and open at its base. What remains is building the mechanisms of trust that attract growth finance.
ESA grants already support seed-stage space companies at scale: its network of Business Incubation Centres has backed more than 2,000 startups across 37 centres in 23 countries. I’d bet many of them are also counting on the upcoming EU Deforestation Regulation — whose main obligations, after successive delays, apply from December 2026, if the date holds this time — to vastly increase demand for satellite monitoring of commodity supply chains. How can ESA’s commercialisation mandate lean on that pull? How can Europe benefit from what it grows? By de-risking demand.
“Space for Europe” — the promise on the gate at ESA’s operations centre in Darmstadt. Photo: my own, 2018.