Riga-based SpaceTech startup Deep Area Vitality has raised a complete €930k to additional develop a radioisotopic generator towards commercialisation, in a bid to strengthen the European sovereign house and protection trade and energy Moon floor exploration.
The funding was made up of its €350k pre-Seed spherical led by Outlast Fund and Linas Sargautis, an angel investor and a former co-founder of NanoAvionics. The corporate additionally secured extra €580k in public contracts and grants by the European Area Company (ESA), NATO DIANA, and the Latvian authorities.
“Our expertise, which has already been validated within the laboratory, has a number of functions throughout the defence and house sectors. First, we’re creating an auxiliary vitality supply to boost the resilience of strategic satellites. It offers the redundancy of satellite tv for pc energy methods by supplying backup energy that doesn’t rely upon photo voltaic vitality, making it essential for high-value army reconnaissance property,” says Mihails Ščepanskis, founder and CEO of the corporate.
Within the 2025–2026 interval, EU-Startups has reported substantial capital flows into the European SpaceTech sector, primarily at Seed and Collection A stage.
Germany’s Reflex Aerospace secured €50 million to scale sovereign satellite tv for pc platforms, whereas France’s Infinite Orbits raised €40 million to increase in-orbit servicing capabilities. Additionally in France, Look Up attracted €50 million to develop its radar-based house surveillance community, and UNIVITY secured €31 million to speed up improvement of a space-based 5G constellation.
In Germany, Marble Imaging raised €5.3 million to scale its very excessive decision Earth statement satellites forward of launch, whereas Spain’s Kreios Area secured €8 million to advance propulsion methods for very low Earth orbit. Italy’s Astradyne raised €2 million to commercialise ultralight photo voltaic panels, and Spain’s Orbital Paradigm closed a €1.5 million pre-Seed spherical to develop reusable house capsules.
Collectively, these rounds signify roughly €187 million in disclosed funding shifting into European SpaceTech throughout adjoining segments together with satellite tv for pc infrastructure, propulsion, communications, servicing and statement.
Towards this backdrop, Deep Area Vitality’s €930k elevate positions it at an earlier proof-of-concept stage throughout the ecosystem, with a give attention to vitality resilience for satellites and lunar missions reasonably than platform deployment.
“As Europe is making an attempt to turn into extra impartial, it’s crucial to provide satellites with superior capabilities on our personal. Our expertise offers an auxiliary vitality supply for satellites, which makes them extra resilient to non-kinetic assaults and malfunctions,” Mihails provides.
Based in 2022, Deep Area Vitality is creating a brand new radioisotope energy generator for house that makes use of the warmth produced by the nuclear self-decay of radioisotopes – supplies extractable from waste of economic nuclear reactors.
The product goals for functions in deep house science missions, lunar floor missions and high-value protection satellites. Their resolution converts that warmth into electrical energy, requiring 5 occasions much less radioisotope gas than a thermo-electric generator (RTG), presently utilized in house.
The corporate highlighted that its radioisotope-based vitality generator just isn’t designed for any type of weapons. It is going to goal high-value, dual-use satellites to extend their resilience and operational reliability. The first focus is on satellites working in Medium Earth Orbit (MEO), Geostationary Orbit (GEO) and Extremely Elliptical Orbit (HEO), that are all important for contemporary army reconnaissance and early-warning methods.
These satellites help a variety of defence features, from artificial aperture radar (SAR)
satellites for detecting troop concentrations by clouds and foliage, to sign intelligence for intercepting communications and radio transmissions, in addition to missile-launch detection, which is crucial for anti-missile protection methods.
Mihails says that the continued struggle in Ukraine clearly demonstrated the decisive function of satellite-based reconnaissance information for contemporary warfare. In 2025, Ukraine misplaced its beachhead in Russian Kursk Oblast at a time when the US quickly terminated the sharing of satellite tv for pc intelligence.
This highlights the strategic significance of satellite-based reconnaissance information and in addition signifies the strategic vulnerability of Europe, which largely depends on the US defencs house property, particularly for high-value GEO satellites.
Egita Poļanska, accomplice on the lead investor Outlast Fund, shares: “Area vitality tech has been caught with sure limitations for many years, however we’re lastly seeing the items come collectively for an actual breakthrough – new supplies, smarter energy methods, and precise industrial demand for lunar operations.
“Deep Area Vitality is constructing the infrastructure that can actually energy the subsequent chapter of house exploration and trade. As Europe ramps up its house ambitions, we want our personal firms to guide in these foundational applied sciences. We’re thrilled to again this staff and actually fairly excited to have an precise moonshot in our portfolio, in probably the most literal sense potential.”
In the long run, the corporate goals to give attention to the Moon financial system. The radioisotope energy generator seems to deal with important vitality challenges within the subsequent part of lunar exploration, together with NASA and ESA’s Artemis, Argonaut and lunar rover programmes, in addition to the Moon Village framework. Particularly, the expertise is designed to help lunar evening survival and operations in completely shadowed areas, enabling prolonged scouting and prospecting missions.
On the Moon, the place the temperatures at evening drop beneath 150 levels Celsius, and nights final for roughly 354 hours, moonrovers can’t depend on solar energy.
The corporate’s expertise requires roughly 2kg of Americium-241 gas to generate 50W of energy for a lunar rover, in contrast with round 10kg of radioisotope materials wanted by legacy RTG methods for comparable output. Given present projections that Americium-241 manufacturing capability will attain round 10kg per yr by the mid-2030s, this effectivity may allow lunar exploration missions to start greater than 5 years earlier and at as much as 5 occasions the mission quantity.
In consequence, industrial lunar actions and useful resource utilisation may emerge considerably before beforehand anticipated.
In accordance with Ščepanskis, the corporate’s expertise can considerably improve the economics of moon rover missions by enabling them to final a number of day-night cycles up to some years. The only bills of bringing payload to the Moon value as much as 1,000,000 euros per kilogram; thus, by enhancing the lifetime of the rovers, the corporate helps to save lots of a whole lot of thousands and thousands.
Linas Sargautis provides: “The Baltic area is more and more recognised for its innovation in house expertise, with Deep Area Vitality serving as one other sturdy instance. By supporting Deep Area Vitality, we’re serving to to determine a stable basis for the way forward for house frontier exploration, similar to lunar and deep-space missions, increasing humanity’s data and footprint, whereas additionally contributing to European house defence capabilities.
“I’m proud to help the corporate’s journey by strengthening the staff’s connections with main house methods integrators, in addition to supporting the corporate’s growth and contracting plans to construct the mandatory experience on the subsystem integration stage.”
