SpaceTech Across Europe, report 2022

In this report we present an overview of the investments in the SpaceTech companies done in Europe between 2017 and 2021,  with a focus on the most recent years 2020-2021. The analysis presented below is supported by a list of 918 deals gathered through the EBAN Space community and our partner Dealroom.co, a platform that gathers all publicly disclosed information on funding rounds made in Europe and beyond. The deals were filtered by the following criteria: companies’ headquarters based in Europe; type of technology utilised by the company and type of industry.

Even if more and more investment rounds are publicly announced, and public fundings such as grants are also disclosed, we are fully aware that information about many investments done are not publicly available. Therefore, these publicly undisclosed deals cannot be taken into account in reports such as this one. We are confident that the data presented in this report shows a valid overview of the SpaceTech sector and its trends although representing the visible investment market only and some undisclosed deals. This report presents an overview of the investment activity across the European continent, not intended for comparison purposes with other markets around the world.

The SpaceTech sector includes projects and companies that adopt space technologies both for space and non-space applications. Given that, in this report we decided to add to the classic upstream/downstream classification an analysis by industry and thematic areas for the biennium 2020-2021. This allows to present the SpaceTech sector to non-space experts and investors in a broader and complete way. This categorization exemplifies the impact of space technologies outside the space industry.

Looking at the trend across the years 2017-2021, we can observe a surge of the investments in the SpaceTech sector, reaching 3.7 billion euros in 2021. It is also clear from the data that the number of funded companies decreased over the years by approximately 50%.

Ultimately, the total amount invested in SpaceTech per country has been considered and compared with the contribution (in percentage) of each country to the ESA budget for activities and programmes.