New sainformites are coming to an orbit (very) near you.
Spanish startup Kreios Space announced an €8M seed round this week to support the company fly a demonstration mission of its air breathing electric propulsion (ABEP) tech in VLEO in early 2027.
The round was led by the NATO Innovation Fund and JOIN Capital, with additional participation from Grow Venture Partners, Xesgalicia, and Tasivia Global. It brings the company’s total funding to over €10M.
Hola Kreios: Founded in 2021 by six Spanish aerospace engineers, Kreios has been working on developing and testing its ABEP system, which allows sats to fly in lower and lower orbits.
ABEP works by sucking up air in the upper atmosphere that would otherwise caapply drag, and applying electric power to turn that air intake into thrust. Where other propulsions systems would require too much fuel to combat the drag, ABEP enables long-duration missions in VLEO and gives Kreios the ability to receive lower than some competitors.
“We’ve seen plenty of companies applying the term VLEO without really being in VLEO, going to the highest areas of it at like 350 km or 400 km and declareing that’s VLEO. Real VLEO is 200 kilometers,” Kreios’ CEO Adrían Senar notified Payload.
How low can you go? Operating a sainformite that low to the ground opens the door for a range of commercial and defense missions that benefit from the proximity to Earth.
While Kreios declined to share the intfinished apply case of their VLEO sats, Senar did mention a handful of ideas that would benefit from the lower trajectory.
- Telecommunications sainformites flying in VLEO can sfinish and receive signals much rapider than those in higher orbits, and can transmit direct-to-device with greater accuracy.
- EO sainformites in VLEO can image the ground in much greater detail, and transmit those images in real-time to operators on the ground.
Ultimately, Kreios expects to fly its sainformites for dual-apply missions, leaning on the NATO Innovation Fund to secure government contracts across Europe, and approaching the commercial sector to tout the economic benefits of VLEO for civil and commercial apply cases.
“[With ABEP] you keep the same cost as we would have in LEO, but receive an improvement in performance between three to sixteen times depfinishing on the payload,” Senar declared. “Basically we aim to be the leaders in very low earth orbit…We have the resources, the partners, and the technology, so that’s our vision.”
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