Open Cosmos: Solving Earth’s Biggest Problems From Space

Open Cosmos designs, manufactures and operates satellites that allow us to understand and connect the world. Last month, the space communication venture successfully launched its first two satellites of its proprietary low Earth orbit constellation, the first activation of a long-term European network. A timely advance with governments viewing satellite communications as critical sovereign infrastructure.

We sat down with Rafel Jorda Siquier, Open Cosmos founder and CEO, as part of our Voices That Matter - Red Book interview series.

In an era when the world’s most pressing problems demand global solutions, UK-based Open Cosmos believes many of the answers we’re looking for can be seen from space.

The ten-year-old company designs and operates satellites delivering critical data to organisations on everything from climate change to disaster response and security issues. By making satellite infrastructure more affordable and accessible to a wider range of customers, Open Cosmos is transforming the way we understand – and respond to – what’s happening on our planet.

While the company boasts a 100% success rate in terms of the functionality of the satellites it’s launched into orbit, not everything has gone as planned.

Founder and CEO Rafel Jorda Siquier says that’s when LocalGlobe has vividly demonstrated the value of having connected and committed partners.

Q Open Cosmos’s mission is to solve Earth’s biggest challenges from space. That’s rather epic. What does it mean in practice?

A It means that we design, manufacture and operate satellites that allow us to understand and connect the world. We believe that by doing this we are able to address big challenges like climate, use of natural resources, energy transition and security and that helps ensure that we have the right information and the right speed of reaction in order to be able to address those issues.

Q Where did the idea come from?

A I founded Open Cosmos 10 years ago. I’m a space engineer and I saw there was a big need in the world for data to really understand what was happening. Satellites are a very unique way to gather that data. I always wondered why this infrastructure is not available to many more companies in many more countries. So I decided to start Open Cosmos, give it a try and push for that infrastructure to be at the service, not only of very big companies or governments, but everyone.

Q What convinced you that this bold mission not only represented a potential solution to massive challenges like climate change, but also a sizable business opportunity?

A Three months into starting Open Cosmos, we got the first contract for a satellite. That was a pretty epic moment, because I always thought it would be harder to sell this sort of infrastructure. Having the trust from a customer from month three and delivering our first satellites after eight months showed us that there was significant demand. We started generating revenues and that allowed us to grow organically. So the commercial appetite was the first sign that this was a business, not only a project.

Q While your ambition is stratospheric, your approach to scaling Open Cosmos has been quite disciplined. How big is the company now?

A We’re about 200 people. We have four factories. Our headquarters in Harwell campus, south of Oxford, is where we have our main factory. Now we have a second one in Barcelona, third one in Coimbra, Portugal, and fourth one in Greece. Last year, we closed contracts north of £100 million.

We’ve been profitable for the last four years, and we are just about to scale the company even further thanks to the downstream applications on the data and the connectivity services.

Q Satellites themselves are nothing new. What’s novel about your approach?

A The traditional space industry has always had very long innovation cycles, delivering satellites over decades, having to pay hundreds of millions for them. We at Open Cosmos believe that there’s an appetite for much faster missions, shorter innovation cycles that enable us to deploy satellites in months rather than years. What that looks like is satellites from 50 kilograms to 500 kilograms and sensors capable of measuring multiple things, providing connectivity services and doing outstanding science in space. We have two products, open orbit and open constellation. One provides satellites as a turnkey solution, and the other one enables sharing satellites in a shared infrastructure so each one of the customers gets a lot more data over the area of the world that matters to them. Then we have the data and AI side of the company, which, thanks to all of the proprietary data that we have from some of these satellites, we are starting to train algorithms and to develop solutions that literally provide information about how wildfires are evolving, likelihood of devastating effects due to floods, monitoring of critical infrastructure, etc.

At Open Cosmos’s UK facility, engineers build satellites in months, not years

Q A lot of tech companies experience setbacks, but few founders have had to confront the kind of failure you faced in 2023 when Virgin Orbit’s first launch on UK soil suffered an anomaly, meaning that its payload, including your satellites were lost. Virgin Orbit went out of business as a result, but Open Cosmos survived. How did you manage to do that? What did you take away from the experience?

A Yes, in all companies, there are ups and downs, particularly when you move fast.

Q How challenging was that moment?

A Honestly, not that challenging. The customer pays for the satellites up front. If they’re launching and something happens, they have insurance. We had done our job and we got paid for it. There have been other moments where we have had challenges, like, for instance, during the pandemic, when we had to stop our factory from operating normally. This was right at the moment when the company was going through an inflection point, starting to gear up towards constellations. Overnight, some of our customers went under, some had to ask for longer payment terms, and we decided to give all of our payments to our suppliers on time and continue with the commitments we had to all of our institutional customers. So that was a very tough moment, and we came out of it much stronger. Actually, we turned the company profitable. This was the end of 2021. Since then, we’ve remained profitable.

Q LocalGlobe first invested in Open Cosmos in 2018, after you participated in the Entrepreneur First accelerator program. What has that relationship been like?

A They are stars. Everyone has been following the company since close to day one. We were so fortunate to have investors with such a depth of knowledge and understanding about what entrepreneurship, growth and scale is about, who are able to share their perspective very generously with first time founders like myself. They’ve been very important to our success on all fronts, from connections with customers to relationships with other investors and advice. They’ve always been supportive and by our side.

Q How has that helped you?

A Some of the largest opportunities, actually that we are working on right now have come from them introducing us to people in their network. When we raised our last round, they were able to help a lot of the other investors quickly understand what we were doing.

Q Open Cosmos is also building new commercial relationships with telecom operators and has won important government contracts. Would you say that you’ve pivoted from the original vision?

A No, not at all. Actually, it was recently our 10th anniversary and I was looking through the first decks that I did when I started the company.

And I was very surprised to see one slide that said Master Plan…and all of that was already there in that initial deck! We’ve had to adapt the way that our products have been marketed, our approach to product market fit but overall, the vision was there. We’ve stayed committed to our purpose.

Q What’s your focus at this moment?

A Scaling the downstream side of the business and keeping the outstanding performance and the 100% success track record that we have on the infrastructure deployment. Nothing that we’ve launched into orbit has ever failed. So every single satellite that we put up there has been working during the entire life. This is very special. This is very unique. Not many,

I don’t know any company that can say something like that in the space industry, right? So we want to keep a super high performance track record, continue delivering successful missions to our customers, larger in number, and then make sure that all of those downstream applications that are going to address the actual global challenges can be grown and scaled together with partners.