Open Cosmos is scaling up!

pen Cosmos has had a great start to 2023. In January, we added another of our satellites to orbit (Menut) and with a further five scheduled for launch over the next 12 months, this will bring the total number of launched satellites to ten. The reception of the first images from the Menut satellite, just one month after launch, demonstrates once again our ability to design, assemble, integrate, test, launch and operate satellites as well as delivering high quality satellite imagery. The company is now ready to scale up this capability in the OpenConstellation.

Rafel (CEO and founder of Open Cosmos) and Florian Deconinck, former VP of Institutional Partnerships and Future Missions, now VP of the newly formed Growth team, talk here about sustainable scalability and the importance of aligning growth plans with customer needs:

Rafel - Open Cosmos has been on quite an impressive trajectory since it founded in 2015, why was now the right time to establish a Growth function?

Open Cosmos was founded in the UK in 2015. The journey from start up to scale up has meant going from 1 to nearly 55 employees. Most are based at our Harwell Campus HQ but we also have growing teams in Barcelona and Porto. Our focus from day one has been delivering comprehensive solutions to our customers and since we founded the company, we have demonstrated our ability to deliver customer missions rapidly, and extract the most valuable data from these. This means we are now able to quickly, easily and successfully repeat the process for new customers - both those looking to join our OpenConstellation and those looking to derive insights from the data we collect. As these solutions reach maturity, it has allowed us to start to scale in a sustainable way, identifying and expanding into high growth areas. In order to manage this scale up, we created a Growth team.

Florian - What value does the Growth team bring to the company, and existing and future customers?

The Growth team acts as the powerhouse of the company, ensuring the immediate needs of the customers are swiftly met and the future ones are translated into a product roadmap and deliverable projects.  Each member of the team combines a mix of programmatic, system engineering, and commercial skills with specific strengths; this is key to guaranteeing productive iterations from the start and ultimately a commitment which customers can trust. We have had a 100% success rate on our launched satellite missions and we intend to repeat this at scale.

What will be the overall remit of the Growth team?

The Growth team has three fundamental functions:

Future missions and data - Mission Concept Engineers Bartomeu Massuti, Jack Bowden, Ieremia Crisan focus on the programmatic and technical definition of space missions and systems before handing them over to project delivery

Business Development - BD Directors Aurelio Marti Ferrer and Maria Kalama will be driving the two growth axes of the business: Aurelio with a specialty in data capabilities and Maria on constellations.

Marketing & Communications - Corrina Gee will be working to ensure Open Cosmos continues to communicate the benefits of satellite data in addressing some of the world's most urgent challenges.

Looking at your plans to scale, how have your solutions evolved over the last eight years?

The company's offering is based on three complementary capabilities all designed to provide affordable, accessible and frequent data from satellites. OpenOrbit, which has established the company as a reliable and trusted end-to-end mission provider. This is complemented with two high growth capabilities - OpenConstellation, a mutualised constellation with a unique business model designed to provide high revisit and decrease data costs by an order of magnitude. And DataCosmos, a powerful, cloud-based platform giving users access to satellite imagery and applications for better, more informed decision making.

The creation of our mutualised infrastructure, OpenConstellation, and the DataCosmos platform mean we can reach non-space customers, alleviating the complexity of space technology through a more rounded solution providing high quality data for actionable information on the planet. These insights are key to helping customers address some of society’s most urgent global challenges, such as the climate crisis, use of natural resources and the response to humanitarian emergencies.