Neuraspace Raises €15.6M: How AI Is Building Europe's Orbital Defense Shield

Financing Structure: Private Series B and Public Grant

The €15.6 million package breaks down into two components :

• €6 million Series B round from strategic private investors: Lince Capital, Explorer Investments, and existing investor Armilar Venture Partners .
• €9.6 million awarded under Portugal's Recovery and Resilience Plan (PRRP), an EU-backed national programme .

This brings Neuraspace's total raised capital to approximately €29 million since its founding .

A notable fiscal detail: Portugal's public funding register showed that €14.39 million in previously assigned PRRP funds had not yet been disbursed to Neuraspace as of 24 July 2026 — meaning the company had received only 30.4% of its earlier public grant commitments . This gap between committed and received public money amounts to roughly 92% of the new €15.6 million headline figure .

Company Origins: From Feedzai's Fraud Detection to Space Debris

Neuraspace was founded in 2020 in Coimbra, Portugal, and incubated at Instituto Pedro Nunes . The idea originated with Nuno Sebastião, who previously worked at the European Space Agency (ESA) Operations Centre and later co-founded Feedzai, a unicorn-valued company that uses AI for financial-crime detection . Sebastião recognised that the emerging congestion and safety challenges in space mirrored the fraud-detection problems that Feedzai solved in finance .

The company is led by CEO Chiara Manfletti, former president of the Portuguese Space Agency and a former senior adviser to the director general of ESA .

Core Platform: AI-Enabled SDA and STM

Neuraspace's platform provides AI-powered Space Domain Awareness and Space Traffic Management to operators across commercial, institutional, and defence sectors . Its key functions include :

• Multi-source data fusion: Combines data from commercial and sovereign sensors — radar, optical telescopes, and radio-frequency feeds — with high-precision orbit determination.
• AI-driven risk assessment: Computes collision probabilities, trajectory conflicts, and anomaly detection using machine learning models.
• Automated collision avoidance: Generates and recommends manoeuvre plans to satellite operators.
• Continuous monitoring: The system currently tracks more than 600 satellites .

Security Threats the Platform Detects

Beyond debris and collision risks, Neuraspace's monitoring addresses a broad spectrum of orbital threats :

• Collision risks and space debris: The company's original core use case — predicting and preventing satellite collisions with debris and other active spacecraft .
• GNSS spoofing and jamming: Detects deliberate interference with GPS/GNSS signals used for satellite navigation and timing .
• Cyber threats against satellites: Identifies anomalous behaviour indicative of cyberattacks on spacecraft command-and-control systems .
• RF interference: Detects unauthorised or hostile radio-frequency emissions that can disrupt satellite communications .
• Counterspace activities (RPOs): Identifies rendezvous and proximity operations by suspected adversary spacecraft approaching friendly satellites — a key military SDA capability .

Planned Use of Funds: Four Priority Areas

The capital is allocated across four areas :

1. AI platform development — Further advancing the machine-learning models for orbit determination, risk prediction, and automated decision-making.
2. Autonomous mission operations — Expanding the ability for satellites to execute manoeuvres and responses without human-in-the-loop.
3. Proprietary optical sensing infrastructure — Building and deploying the company's own network of optical telescopes (and complementing with radar sensors) for sovereign sensor data collection, reducing reliance on third-party data sources .
4. NeuraspaceDEF dual-use solution — Accelerating the defence-oriented product line that provides military-grade SDA to European defence ministries and allied armed forces, detecting hostile counterspace activities .

NeuraspaceDEF was first launched in October 2025 and is designed to move beyond passive monitoring toward active and autonomous control, providing rapid responses to threats such as physical approaches by adversary spacecraft . The company also won the NATO DIANA Challenge in early 2026 for its defence-grade SDA capabilities .

Why This Matters: Europe's Push for Sovereign Space Awareness

Neuraspace's financing round arrived on the same day as two other European space-intelligence announcements, signalling a broader consolidation in the market . The company's bet is that Europe needs sovereign Space Domain Awareness independent of US providers — a need made more urgent by increasing satellite traffic, the proliferation of debris, and the weaponisation of space .

The company is also in negotiations with the Portuguese Air Force to install a radar on an air base, which would further strengthen its sovereign sensing capability .