Lithuania’s Blackswan Space, has successfully closed its second investment round, led by Iron Wolf Capital, raising €2.5 million. Together with the company’s pre-seed round, its total funding now amounts to €3.2 million.
Other investors included Lemonade Stand and former NanoAvionics co-founder Linas Sargautis – all previous investors of Blackswan – as well as NGL Ventures and Tomas Žalandauskas, who also founded multiple successful high-tech companies in Lithuania.
Founded in 2019, Blackswan Space has been developing its innovative Mission Design Simulator (MDS) software for next-gen autonomous space missions, and its rendezvous & proximity operations (RPO) system, the RPO Kit, a plug-and-play spacecraft payload designed to autonomously perform complex navigation manoeuvres, leveraging advanced vision-based target detection, identification and tracking.
Blackswan has grown from two technical experts into a dedicated team of 25 people across Vilnius, London, and Denver.
As the number of satellites in orbit grows rapidly, Blackswan’s technology stack is becoming increasingly relevant, enabling space mission operators to perform autonomous asset inspection and servicing, as well as collision avoidance and operations management, without building these complex technologies in-house.
While Blackswan’s pre-seed round allowed it to commercialise its Mission Design Simulator (MDS), capable of modelling complex autonomous mission execution, and secure multiple commercial customers in both the EU and the US, including Auria Space, this latest funding enables Blackswan to accelerate the commercialisation of its RPO Kit, and further the company’s expansion in the USA
As the next major milestone on the way to commercialise the system, Blackswan will be testing its RPO Kit in orbit next year. The launch is scheduled for Q4 in 2027.
This will be followed by the first European in-space refuelling mission “ASTRAL” (Advance Satcom Technology with Refuelling and Logistics), planned for 2028.
ASTRAL is backed by up to €3.3 million in funding from the UK Space Agency and the European Space Agency (ESA).
Jake Geer, managing director of Orbit Fab UK, said:
“This team has proven themselves to be highly capable and driven from the very beginning. That and their strong relationship with ESA is why we selected Blackswan to provide one of the most critical components – the RPO Kit – for our upcoming first European refuelling demonstration mission “ASTRAL”, flying in 2028.”
According to Viktoras Jucikas, founding partner at Iron Wolf Capital, a satellite in orbit today is blind and deaf without the ground.
“It cannot tell what has parked next to it, cannot avoid a collision on its own, and cannot be easily repaired or refuelled. Blackswan Space is working to change that. Its navigation payload gives spacecraft their own eyes and the intelligence to manoeuvre relative to another object.
At Iron Wolf Capital, we back the technologies Europe cannot afford to depend on third-countries to provide, and we back them early. Autonomy in orbit is one of them, and Blackswan is building it."
Marius Klimavičius, CEO of Blackswan, said:
“We are very excited to have closed our latest investment round. I am particularly proud that all our current investors are local, coming from Lithuania and Estonia. This is no small feat for a company like Blackswan Space, considering that pockets were never that deep for space startups in our region.
This achievement is testament to the work and effort that went into developing our unique technology as well as growing the business to stack up and succeed even against much bigger players."
The company has been undertaking rigorous testing campaigns to prove the efficacy of its approach for its simulations and VBN technologies, used in its Mission Design Simulator and RPO-Kit.
"Right now, our focus is to fully prove our current technology performs in space, allowing us to go after some very exciting new market opportunities,” concluded Klimavičius.
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