Neuraspace has secured €15.6 million to expand the artificial intelligence, sensor infrastructure, and autonomous operations behind its commercial and defence space-monitoring services.

The financing combines private capital from Lince Capital, Explorer Investments, and Armilar Venture Partners with an award under Portugal’s Recovery and Resilience Plan. Neuraspace has not disclosed how the total is divided between equity and public funding, nor the valuation attached to the private investment.

The Portuguese company intends to expand its space traffic management platform, increase its network of proprietary optical sensors, develop more autonomous mission operations, and continue building NeuraspaceDEF for government and military customers.

Founded in 2020, Neuraspace operates from Portugal, Luxembourg, and Germany. The main body of its funding announcement says the platform now monitors more than 600 commercial and institutional satellites, while the appended company description gives an older figure of more than 500.

Traffic management becomes security infrastructure

Space traffic management traditionally concentrates on calculating satellite positions, identifying close approaches, and helping operators decide whether to perform an avoidance manoeuvre. As low-Earth orbit becomes busier, the volume of warnings and the speed at which operators must assess them make automation increasingly useful.

Neuraspace combines orbit calculations, information from several sensors, AI-supported risk assessment, manoeuvre planning, and operational decision support. Its commercial customers include satellite operators and manufacturers, while the European Space Agency is also named among users of its services.

The company says revenue grew by more than 350% during the past year, although it has not disclosed the underlying amount. Commercial traction appears to be strengthening, but the percentage alone does not establish the scale or profitability of the business.

Alongside accidental collisions, Neuraspace is expanding into monitoring deliberate threats such as radio-frequency interference, spoofing or jamming of navigation signals, cyberattacks, and hostile behaviour around satellites. Those risks move space monitoring closer to defence intelligence, where the provenance, availability, and control of sensor data become strategically important.

“Safety and security are no longer separate challenges—they are two sides of the same operational problem,” Chiara Manfletti, chief executive of Neuraspace, said in the funding announcement.

Neuraspace already holds contracts involving the Portuguese Air Force and NATO, and says it has also been selected as a prime contractor by a European defence ministry that it did not identify. Its position across commercial and military work makes the technology dual use: collision avoidance and orbit determination can protect an ordinary communications satellite, while similar data can help a government understand activity around sensitive assets.

Europe wants greater control over orbital data

The European Union has been building a common approach to space traffic management through cooperation between civilian operators, defence organisations, national authorities, and the EU Space Surveillance and Tracking partnership. In June, 21 civilian operators and 14 military counterparts completed a shared set of operating requirements after two years of work.

Those initiatives are intended partly to reduce dependence on external surveillance capabilities. European operators have historically relied heavily on tracking information supplied through US systems, while national sensors and commercial providers offer additional observations and analysis.

A sovereign capability does not require every telescope, data source, or software component to be owned by one country. Europe does, however, need sufficient independent sensing, processing, and operational expertise to verify warnings, protect sensitive information, and maintain services when external data is restricted or unavailable.

Neuraspace intends to use part of the new capital to expand its own optical sensing infrastructure. Telescopes can observe satellites and debris, improving orbit estimates when their data is combined with radar and other sources, although coverage is affected by geography, weather, daylight, and the physical properties of the object being tracked.

Building a larger sensor network can improve the independence and precision of the platform, but it also increases capital and operating costs. The company will need enough government and commercial contracts to support equipment distributed across multiple locations, as well as the communications and data-processing infrastructure connecting them.

Autonomy raises the evidential burden

Neuraspace is also pursuing more autonomous mission operations, reflecting a wider effort to reduce the time between detecting a risk and responding to it. Satellite constellations can generate more conjunction alerts than human teams can investigate manually, particularly as the number of active spacecraft continues to rise.

Automation can filter low-risk events, combine observations, compare possible manoeuvres, and present a recommended course of action. The consequences of an incorrect instruction are unusually high, because a manoeuvre consumes limited fuel, can interrupt a mission, and may alter the risk faced by neighbouring spacecraft.

Operators therefore need to understand the uncertainty around an orbit estimate, the assumptions used by a model, and why a particular manoeuvre has been recommended. AI can accelerate analysis, but it cannot remove the need for traceable data and clearly assigned operational authority.

The defence market adds further complexity because threats may be ambiguous and sensor information may be classified, incomplete, or intentionally manipulated. Systems used in that setting must distinguish a technical anomaly from hostile activity without turning every unexpected movement or signal loss into an alarm.

Neuraspace’s financing gives it more capacity to build the sensors, software, and customer base required for that work. Its progress will be measured by the accuracy of its orbital data, the reliability of its recommendations, and the extent to which European operators can depend on the service during routine operations and security incidents.