WASHINGTON — As Europe begins to put real money into developing military space capabilities to reduce dependency on the United States, British thermal imagery startup SatVu and Spanish tech firm GMV are among the latest companies to step into the breach.
In its latest financing round, SatVu nabbed first-time funds from the NATO Innovation Fund, as well as from the UK government’s British Investment Bank and other venture capital firms, the company announced Tuesday. The round netted the company £30 million ($40 million) total, bringing its “total equity funding” up to £60 million, SatVu said, although the announcement did not break down the individual contributions making up the new funds.
The NATO Investment Fund acts as a “standalone venture capital” backed by 24 NATO allies, with slightly more than €1 billion (almost $1.2 billion) to invest in “deep tech,” according to the fund’s website. Space is one of the fund’s portfolios, with investment in three other startups besides SatVu: Isar Aerospace, a small launch firm based in Germany; Kreios Space, a Spanish firm planning launches to very low Earth orbit; and Simera Sense, a UK maker of high resolution optical and multispectral camers remote sensing satellites.
While the NATO investment doesn’t come with any contractual guarantees from NATO or its 32 member states, it does lend SatVu street cred as it pursues European defense ministry interest in its HotSat satellite series, Scott Herman, the company’s new chief technology officer, told Breaking Defense on Wednesday.
“There is certainly a lot of ‘move’ within NATO and the European countries for more self sufficiency. And so this NATO Investment Fund investment is basically a stamp of approval and credibility that we have something to offer in that realm,” he said.
SatVu is set to launch its HotSat-2 bird “in just a few weeks,” Herman said, going up on SpaceX’s Falcon 9 Transporter 16 mission, followed by HotSat-3 sometime before the end of the year. (The company’s first satellite, HotSat-1, was launched in June 2023, but six months later suffered a failure with its camera.)
Indeed, a study cosponsored by the NATO Investment Fund and Amsterdam-based database management firm Dealroom released Feb. 10 found that that European “Defence, Security and Resilience” startups secured a record $8.7 billion in venture capital in 2025 — up 55 percent from 2024, and four times greater than 2020 levels.
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“The surge was fuelled by late-stage mega-rounds to support breakthrough technologies that help address critical capabilities for NATO nations — from freedom of operations [and] mobility, to awareness and decision making, and the security of critical technologies,” according to the study.
NATO collectively also plans to beef up its acquisition of space capabilities including that of commercial intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance imagery and analysis.
Spain’s Defence Ministry meanwhile continues to expand its space surveillance program, with a new agreement with Spanish tech conglomerate GMV for a satellite tracking antenna to be based at Morón Air Base in Seville, the company announced Tuesday.
The Focusear antenna will provide data to Spain’s Space Command (Mando del Espacios) for its Space Operations and Surveillance Center based at Torrejón Air Base near Madrid. Known as COVE, for Centro de Operaciones de Vigilancia Espacial, the center also is using GMV’s Space Situational Awareness and Control System to keep tabs on the heavens.
The GMV system, based on its Ecosstm software, is providing “orbital calculation and propagation, the generation and maintenance of a space object catalog, atmospheric reentry prediction, observation campaign planning, overflight computation, GNSS [Global Navigation Satellite System] signal degradation analysis, and space weather data processing,” according to a company press release.
COVE is also supporting NATO and European Union space situational awareness activities. NATO’s Military Committee paid a visit to Torrejón earlier this month.