There has been a real gold rush in the space economy lately. One only has to think of two of the most influential tech entrepreneurs, such as Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, who, after kick-starting their companies, electric cars and marketplaces, have shifted their focus to spacetech. The sector could exceed one trillion dollars by 2040 (source: Morgan Stanley, ‘Space: Investing in the Final Frontier’, 2022), and the opportunities range from Earth observation and space tourism to biotechnology research and space mining.
Across the ocean, Europe too, albeit belatedly, is following and has shown interest in creating an ecosystem. The latest news saw the Italian scaleup D-Orbit, which had just completed its €150 million Series C round, announce the signing of a €119.6 million contract with the European Space Agency (ESA) as part of the Space Safety project. And the latter, at the same time, created a joint venture with OVHcloud, a European cloud services company, consolidating their collaboration to support innovative start-ups in the space sector with a focus on AI and sustainability.
The beauty of spacetech is that it is really an ecosystem, and in the Italian one there are several realities that are standing out, made up of important stories that are making a difference. One of these is Picosats, a Trieste-based start-up operating in the field of satellite telecommunications. Among its goals was to demonstrate the Ka-band technology developed with the support of the ESA through an in-orbit mission in collaboration with D-Orbit. In November 2023, Picosats’ technology was then integrated on board D-Orbit’s ION satellite carrier in SpaceX’s Transponder-9 mission, with a very successful in-orbit validation.
It is nice when achievements are also recognised by the players in the ecosystem itself, by their community. And so Picosats was honoured yesterday with the Innovative SME Award, organised by InnovUp.
“Italian science and technology parks represent a systemic resource, operating with strong territorial roots aimed at stimulating the growth of innovative enterprises,” says Stefano Soliano, vice-president of InnovUp. “We are proud of the success of this first edition of the Innovative InnovUp SME Award, an initiative that confirms the importance of connecting and enhancing the entrepreneurial excellence of our country.
The award consisted of two stages, the first local, awarding the best companies at regional level. Picosats, having successfully passed this first step, was finally awarded the final prize in the second national phase.
“After the recognition at the regional level of Friuli-Venezia Giulia, the InnovUp award at the national level comes as a wonderful surprise that honours us, especially for the stature of the other finalists, innovative SMEs that operate in an exceptional manner,’ comments Anna Gregorio, founder and president of Picosats. ‘When people ask me what the value of Picostats is, it seems obvious, but the answer is the team. Working with boys and girls, very young, is better every day. Managing such intelligent people can be very complex, so I am proud that this is the most important achievement of Mario Fragiacomo, co-founder of Picosats, and myself that we have built and given a solid job to all of them. Add to this, of course, the technology, which is extremely expensive to work at the cutting edge of space. And to achieve all this, I thank the investment funds, LIFTT, Progress Tech Transfer and Galaxia, and all our partners, who believed and believe in us. I would like to add my thanks to the University of Trieste, which convinced me 10 years ago to start Picosats, Area Science Park and Polo Tecnologico Alto Adriatico, because science and technology parks can give so much and we must also be an active part of them’.
Startupbusiness has been following it since the Enea tech case. Picosats’ story, in fact, was also intertwined at the time with the story of several realities like his that had participated in Enea tech’s first call for ideas, reaching the final stage, that of funding, only to see it all come to nothing.
In this regard, Anna Gregorio herself told us how she was able to overcome that moment: ‘we needed an acceleration, because we could still continue on our own as a spin-off, but this posed a big problem: should we keep going on our own strengths or give it an acceleration? The problem with space is that you always have to have your technology proven in space. So what is called ‘in order to demonstrate’. And flight costs money. There are also public opportunities that are given by the agencies, but you have to be in their timeframe, which is not the timeframe of the market. We practically had a technology that could exploit the possibility of being first on the market certainly at European level, but also internationally. So we had to push to be able to complete this phase as quickly as possible. So we started looking for a financier, an investment fund, and here we are with Enea tech. Let’s say that the due diligence was already finished, and according to what they said, we were among the first to be on the financing path.
In short, it was almost done, then the arrival of an amendment to art. 31 of the Ristori Bis enacted overnight, out of nowhere, which saw 200 million euro of the 500 allocated to the biomedical sector shifted to the body. And all of Enea tech was put on standby, and with it, all the projects of the companies that had participated.
But Picosats and his team did not give up. Despite Enea tech’s call ‘It looked so promising, so good that it was difficult to have a plan B,’ says Gregorio, ‘Soon afterwards we started thinking about crowdfunding. We started looking at each other and that’s when discussions started with another funding fund and then another one that had already done a small study on us months before’. The fund was LIFTT, and in fact by that time the transponder project, a satellite transceiver, was ready. Picosats already had the first prototypes and only needed to industrialise them.The story of Picosats deserves an award for this too, for the tenacity of having had faith in its product and team and defending it to the last, especially when the most ominous moment had come. This story is concrete proof of Italian innovation and this is also why it should be awarded: when entrepreneurship, research, science and humanity come together, every challenge becomes an opportunity and no goal is unattainable.
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