Nebex, a New York exchange startup founded in 2025 by former Axiom Space executives, signed a framework agreement on 5 October 2026 with Mexican Earth observation company Thrusters Unlimited. The two say they will structure and execute US$700 million of initial sovereign space programs in Latin America, covering Earth observation, telecommunications and other strategic capabilities. Nebex handles transaction structuring and capital flow; Thrusters Unlimited supplies local industrial knowledge and relationships. The US$700 million is a programme pipeline, not money raised or contracts awarded.
Governments that want their own sovereign space programs usually discover that the satellite is the easy part. The hard part is the transaction: financing a multi-year purchase, managing export rules, satisfying local-content demands and making sure a young supplier survives long enough to deliver. On 5 October 2026 two companies announced a partnership aimed squarely at that problem in Latin America. Nebex, a venture-backed startup that describes itself as market infrastructure for the space economy, and Thrusters Unlimited, a Mexican satellite operator, signed a framework agreement covering what they call US$700 million in initial programmes. This article, part of the Kurums Space Economy hub, explains what was announced, how each company makes money, and how much weight readers should put on the headline number.
What happened?
Nebex and Thrusters Unlimited signed a framework agreement to structure and execute sovereign space programs in Latin America, starting with US$700 million of programmes in Earth observation, telecoms and strategic capabilities.
Why does it matter commercially?
It applies an exchange-style financial model, with payment protection and capital coordination, to government space procurement in a region that has bought little from the new commercial space sector.
What should readers watch?
The first named government buyer, the first signed supply contract under the framework, who provides the capital and insurance, and whether the model repeats outside Mexico.
What did Nebex and Thrusters Unlimited announce?
The companies signed a framework agreement to work together on government space programmes in Latin America, beginning in Mexico. They put the value of the initial programmes at US$700 million across Earth observation, telecommunications and other strategic space capabilities.
The division of labour is set out in the press release. Thrusters Unlimited provides local industrial expertise and connections to stakeholders, including, according to Payload, links to Mexican procurement programmes. Nebex provides transaction structuring, coordination of capital and what it calls execution infrastructure. Payload summarised the aim as connecting Mexican demand with industrial supply while managing capital flow and procurement.
Nebex chief executive Tejpaul Bhatia said in the release: “Sovereign space programs succeed or fail on executability, not ambition. Thrusters Unlimited understands the ground in Latin America.” BenjamΓn Najar Jr., founder and chief executive of Thrusters Unlimited, said: “The region is ready to move on serious space programs. Working with Nebex gives our partners the structuring and execution infrastructure these programs demand.”
A framework agreement is an umbrella. It sets out how two parties will cooperate when specific deals arise. The announcement does not name a government agency as buyer, a satellite manufacturer as supplier, a bank as lender or an insurer. Those details will determine whether the US$700 million figure turns into contracts.
How should the US$700 million figure be read?
The US$700 million describes the size of the programmes the partners intend to structure, not capital that has been raised or orders that have been placed. Payload’s headline uses the word “unlock”, and the press release speaks of “initial programs”. No disbursement schedule has been published.
This distinction matters for anyone assessing the two companies. Nebex itself has raised US$30 million in equity. Thrusters Unlimited is a private company whose finances are not public. Neither has the balance sheet to fund US$700 million of satellites. The figure is therefore a statement about demand that the partners believe exists in Mexican and regional government plans, and about financing they believe can be arranged from banks, export credit agencies, insurers and investors once transactions are structured.
Readers should treat it as a pipeline number. In enterprise sales terms it is closer to qualified opportunity than to booked revenue. What would convert it is a sequence of signed procurement contracts with identified funding. The partners have not given a timetable for the first of these.
Who is Nebex and what is its business model?
Nebex is a New York startup founded in 2025 that runs a commercial exchange connecting space companies with government buyers and sources of capital. Its founders include Tejpaul Bhatia, a former chief executive of Axiom Space, and it raised a US$30 million seed round led by GV in June 2026.
The other founders are Anand Subramanian, described by Business Wire as the founder of venture-backed exchanges ContextWeb and NimbleTV and by Payload as a former Axiom chief growth officer, and Manlio Di Stefano, a former vice minister of foreign affairs of Italy. The seed round included Eniac Ventures, 2048 Ventures, Better Tomorrow Ventures, Oceans Ventures and several other funds, and the company announced a banking relationship with J.P. Morgan at the same time.
Nebex describes its product as an exchange layer. Bhatia’s diagnosis, quoted by FinTech Global, is that “ambitious space founders struggle to deliver complex sovereign programmes due to the lack of capital markets infrastructure.” In practice that means cash-flow gaps between contract signature and payment, and the high fixed cost of cross-border deals. He told Tech.eu that such deals can require “$1 million or more on lawyers, lobbyists, IT systems, and compliance costs,” which makes smaller contracts uneconomic.
The most concrete description of the mechanism comes from Payload, where Bhatia said: “What we’re able to do is wrap the entire transaction with insurance. I’m not ensuring whether the vehicle goes up or not. What do I know about that? But I’m ensuring whether someone gets paid or not.” In other words, Nebex is addressing counterparty and payment risk, not technical risk. How Nebex itself earns revenue, whether through transaction fees, a spread on financing or subscriptions, has not been disclosed in the sources reviewed.
Who is Thrusters Unlimited?
Thrusters Unlimited is a Mexican Earth observation and space systems company led by founder BenjamΓn Najar Jr. The joint press release says it was founded in 2018 and operates Mexico’s only high-resolution Earth observation satellite constellation, selling imagery and analytics across Latin America.
Earlier Mexican press coverage gives background. A 2022 profile carried by DPL News described the company as a geoinformation business with two satellites in orbit, produced with Portuguese partner Geosat, and with a memorandum of understanding with the Mexican Space Agency to provide Earth observation services. The same report said it had raised about EUR 100 million from Spectre Air Capital and Geosat and wanted to become the first company to manufacture satellites in Mexico, subject to a legal framework that Najar was discussing with legislators. Those figures are four years old and have not been updated in the new announcement.
For Nebex, the value of a partner like this is access. Government space purchases in emerging markets are relationship-driven and move through agencies, ministries and legislatures that foreign suppliers find hard to read. For Thrusters Unlimited, the value is the ability to offer its government contacts a complete, financed package and to position itself as the local industrial partner in whatever is bought.
Why do sovereign space programs need new financial plumbing?
Government demand for space capability is growing in countries that have no domestic industry, while supply is concentrated in a few places. Nebex cites government space spending of US$138 billion in 2025 and says more than 85% of available supply sits in the United States and Europe.
Those figures, reported by Tech.eu from Nebex’s material, frame the opportunity. Nebex estimates what it calls a US$70 billion annual export gap. A ministry in a middle-income country that wants imaging satellites faces a choice between large primes with export-credit support and young commercial suppliers that are cheaper and faster but financially fragile. A missed milestone payment can sink the supplier, and a supplier failure can sink the programme.
Three tools address this. Escrow and milestone payment structures protect both sides. Insurance on payment, as Bhatia describes, makes the receivable financeable. And industrial-return arrangements answer the political question of what the buying country gets back. In August 2026 Nebex launched a EUR 100 million initiative in France that promises one euro of domestic industrial return for every euro of eligible cross-border spending. Bhatia told Tech.eu it “literally has to be 100 per cent. Not a promise to open an office…Actual money being reinvested back into the sector.” The Latin American framework applies related thinking from the buyer’s side.
On 6 October 2026, a day after the Mexico announcement, Nebex and the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs said they had exchanged letters of intent to explore ways of widening developing nations’ access to the space economy. That gives the company a policy channel to the emerging space nations it wants as customers.
| Date | Nebex milestone | Detail |
|---|---|---|
| 2025 | Company founded | New York; founders from Axiom Space and Italian government |
| 29 Jun 2026 | Seed round | US$30 million led by GV; J.P. Morgan banking relationship |
| 17 Aug 2026 | France Industrial Return Initiative | EUR 100 million; one-for-one domestic return on eligible spending |
| 5 Oct 2026 | Thrusters Unlimited framework agreement | US$700 million of initial Latin American programmes |
| 6 Oct 2026 | UNOOSA letters of intent | Access to space for emerging space nations |
Who competes with this model?
Nebex has few direct competitors because the category is new, but it competes indirectly with export credit agencies, prime contractors’ own financing arms, specialist insurers and brokers, and with governments’ habit of buying through bilateral agreements.
Large satellite manufacturers have long offered vendor financing and government-backed export credit as part of a sale. That bundle is the incumbent solution, and it works for large orders from established primes. It works less well for a US$20 million contract with a startup, which is the gap Nebex targets. Space insurers are also moving towards new products; Kurums recently covered Charter Space’s seed round for in-orbit insurance.
On the supply side, the companies most likely to benefit are those already selling to governments. Earth observation providers such as ICEYE and Planet sell heavily to government customers, as described in the ICEYE company story and the Planet Labs company story. If an exchange lowers the cost of closing a deal in Mexico City or BogotΓ‘, these are the kinds of suppliers that could appear on the other side. Whether they would route sales through a third-party platform, and pay for the privilege, is untested.
What does this mean for founders, operators and investors?
For founders, it points to a route into government markets that were previously too costly to pursue. For operators in Latin America, it offers a way to become the local partner in larger programmes. For investors, it is an early test of whether space fintech can generate transaction revenue.
Founders of satellite, ground segment and data companies should watch whether Nebex-structured deals actually close, and on what terms. If the model works, a startup could sell to a foreign government without opening a local subsidiary or hiring a lobbying firm. The trade-off is margin and control: an intermediary that structures the deal and arranges payment protection will take a fee and will sit between supplier and customer.
Operators in emerging markets can learn from Thrusters Unlimited’s positioning. A small domestic operator cannot build a national constellation alone, but it can be the entity that understands the buyer, hosts ground infrastructure and performs local work. That role becomes more valuable when local-content rules are attached to procurement. Infrastructure services are a recurring theme in this series; see our article on Outpost’s manufacturing-as-a-service offer for an in-orbit example.
Investors should be careful with scale. A US$30 million seed round is large for a company founded in 2025, and three announcements in four months show commercial energy. None of the announcements discloses revenue. The business will be proven by completed transactions, default experience and the willingness of banks and insurers to stand behind the structures. More financing news from the sector is collected in the Kurums space funding rounds archive.
What are the open questions?
The open questions are who the buyers are, who supplies the hardware, who provides capital and insurance, how Nebex is paid, and how the partnership handles regulation in each country. None of these has been answered publicly.
Mexico’s institutional setting is one unknown. Thrusters Unlimited’s own executives said in 2022 that domestic satellite manufacturing needed a new legal framework. The announcement does not say whether that has changed or which agencies would sign contracts. Supplier selection is another. A neutral exchange has to show that it is not steering business towards favoured vendors, especially when its local partner is itself a satellite operator that could be a supplier.
There is also a governance question familiar from other marketplaces: when a platform insures payment, it takes on exposure to sovereign counterparties. How that risk is priced and who ultimately holds it will decide whether the model scales. Space is a sector where technical failure is common, as this summer’s failed Katalyst rescue of NASA’s Swift telescope showed, so the line between payment risk and performance risk will be tested the first time a financed mission goes wrong.
What should you watch next?
Watch for the first named government programme under the framework, the identity of financing and insurance partners, expansion to a second Latin American country, and any disclosure of Nebex’s transaction volume or fee model.
A realistic first sign of progress would be a memorandum or contract with a Mexican federal body for Earth observation capacity, with a named manufacturer and a stated financing structure. A second would be a bank or export credit agency publicly attached to a deal. On the Nebex side, the France initiative gives a parallel test: if French startups begin winning foreign government work through the exchange, the supply side of the Latin American programmes becomes easier to fill. If twelve months pass with further frameworks but no completed transaction, the headline figures should be discounted accordingly.
Frequently Asked Questions
Has Nebex raised US$700 million for Mexico?
No. The US$700 million is the stated size of the initial programmes that Nebex and Thrusters Unlimited intend to structure. Nebex’s own equity funding is a US$30 million seed round announced in June 2026.
What does Thrusters Unlimited do?
It is a Mexican company, founded in 2018 according to the joint press release, that operates Earth observation satellites and sells imagery and analytics in Latin America. It acts as the local industrial partner in the agreement.
How does Nebex reduce risk in a space contract?
Its chief executive says the company wraps transactions with insurance covering whether parties get paid, not whether the mission succeeds technically. It also coordinates capital and structures payments.
Which governments are involved?
None has been named. The press release refers to sovereign programmes in Latin America, and Payload reports that the capital is intended for Mexican sovereign space programmes.
Sources
- Nebex press release: Nebex and Thrusters Unlimited partner to structure and execute sovereign space programs (5 October 2026)
- Payload: Nebex partners with Thrusters Unlimited to unlock $700M for Mexico’s space ecosystem
- Business Wire: Nebex raises $30M seed round led by GV (29 June 2026)
- Tech.eu: Nebex launches β¬100M initiative for French startups (17 August 2026)
- UNOOSA and Nebex letters of intent press release (6 October 2026)
- DPL News: the Mexican company that wants the country to build satellites (Thrusters Unlimited profile)
- FinTech Global: Nebex raises $30m seed investment for the space economy
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