For decades, the aerospace industry has operated on a bespoke, hardware-centric model. Building and launching a satellite has been a massive undertaking—slow, incredibly expensive, and accessible mainly to governments and the largest corporations. While software has been eating the world, space has remained analog. The world is being rewired by data and infrastructure, but space, the layer meant to connect it all, still can’t build affordable constellations at scale. EnduroSat is changing that, and we’re proud to back Raycho Raychev and team as they pioneer a new model for satellites and space services.
Based in Sofia, Bulgaria, the company is applying a mass manufacturing approach to satellite production, enabling the industry’s shift from a vertical to a horizontal ecosystem. EnduroSat’s financial profile is what sets it apart. While most aerospace companies burn capital for years, EnduroSat was profitable in its first year of sales. The business continues to grow rapidly, and every line of business maintains software-like margins. These are metrics you expect from a high-margin software business, not a hardware manufacturer. This financial discipline is the direct result of their core philosophy: designing for manufacturing. Lacking early venture funding from when they first started out, the team was forced to build nearly every component in-house. This created a deep vertical integration and expertise that is now their core advantage. Their assembly line leverages the manufacturing expertise of Central and Eastern Europe, and the strength of this approach is so clear that their customers now include their direct competitors, who purchase EnduroSat’s subsystems.
This manufacturing efficiency serves a clear purpose: making space data abundant and affordable. As machine learning models become widely available, the durable advantage shifts to the proprietary data used to train them. By radically lowering the cost of data acquisition from orbit (whether for high-resolution imagery, radar, or navigation), EnduroSat provides the essential infrastructure for companies to build their own data assets.
We’re proud to back Raycho Raychev and team as they continue to execute with precision and speed. Remarkably, by early next year, the company is on track to become the largest satellite manufacturer in the world outside of Starlink.