Thermal imaging is a hot area right now in satellite tech, and today Constellr — one of the startups building the hardware to capture thermal images and the software to understand them better — is announcing €37 million (around $44 million) in funding to expand its business.
Alpine Space Ventures and Lakestar are co-leading the Series A, with participation from new backers Semapa Next, Bayern Kapital, Cardumen Capital, Cooperative Ventures, Kineo Finance; and previous backers Vsquared, CosmiCapital, Fraunhofer Technologie-Transfer Fonds, and EIC Fund. Constellr has now raised €75 million, and it’s not disclosing its valuation.
The startup is based out of Munich, which is shaping up to be the capital of defence tech in Europe: Hypersonica, Helsing, Isar Aerospace, Stark, Quantum Systems, ARX Robotics, Hensoldt and Tytan are among the many startups operating in and around the city.
Constellr didn’t originally get its start in defence tech, however.
It was founded in 2020 originally as a spinout from the Fraunhofer applied research group to track water movement to improve agricultural yield. (“More crop per drop” was its motto when it launched its first satellite in 2022.)
But similar to another thermal imaging startup, Hydrosat (which raised a significant round last month), Constellr has widened the use cases it addresses. It now also works with military and government customers and that shift has paid off, with inbound interest and business growing tenfold, according to Dr. Max Gulde, the startup’s CEO and co-founder.
“Since we started to address the military market, the sales pipeline has exploded. Pun intended,” he said in an interview.
Constellr says that the key component of its hardware — the sensors that snap the thermal images for processing — are able to detect temperatures within 2 degrees Celsius of accuracy and 0.1 degree of “sensitivity”, giving users an idea not just of temperature but how it’s moving over time.
All the same, the data it gathers today come from just two satellites — giving the company essentially no redundancy in the event one or both of its current vessels are taken out through a technical fault or an anti-satellite rocket. The plan, Gulde said, is to eventually have “dozens” more satellites, as well as more robust, defence-grade systems across all of then.
Yet the work the Constellr is doing under the current, minimal set-up is an indication of just how much can be achieved with very little. (and signals what more it might be able to do in future).
Recently, it said, using thermal data, it was able to track maritime activity near the Russian Rybachiy nuclear submarine base. While nighttime movement rendered optical imagery useless, the thermal camera was able to track a vessel’s speed and direction in the water for as long as 60 minutes after it moved past, a critical seam of information of data when you consider how submarines are meant to be hidden and stealthy by nature.
Other objects and activities that can be detected include missile fuel depots, secret manufacturing sites, and logistics hubs, the company said.
The company’s “resilience” profile is two-fold: in addition to providing critical data from a European provider to private and public entities in Europe, Gulde noted that the company’s entire supply chain is also sovereign.
It’s that angle that interested investors, too.
“constellr’s technology delivers an intelligence capability Europe has long needed: the ability to see not just where assets are, but how they are operating – the behavioural insight that turns detection into intent assessment,” said Bulent Altan of Alpine Space Ventures in a statement. “This funding will take an already operational system and scale it through the first steps into series production to full defence-grade performance, giving Europe the missing third axis in sovereign ISR.”
“Fostering European tech resilience and sovereignty is Lakestar’s core mission,” added Klaus Hommels of Lakestar.
