ORiS Pre-Seed Round: €5M to Beam Laser Power Between Satellites

The ORiS pre-seed round is one of the larger first institutional cheques written to a European space hardware company in 2026, and it backs an idea that sounds simple and is hard to execute: sell electricity to satellites by laser. ORiS, short for Orbital Recharge in Space, wants spacecraft to buy power in orbit instead of carrying every watt they will ever need. This article, part of the Kurums Space Economy hub, sets out what was announced, who invested, how the company could earn revenue before anything flies, and where the plan is exposed.

What was announced in the ORiS pre-seed round?

ORiS announced €5 million of funding on 21 July 2026. According to Tech.eu and the company’s incubator I3P, €4.5 million is pre-seed equity led by Earlybird and co-led by Pitchdrive, with Galaxia, Vento and Piemonte Next Fund participating. The remaining €0.5 million is a regional grant.

The grant comes from the Piedmont Region’s “Consolidamento patrimoniale e crescita delle start up innovative” programme, which supports the capitalisation and growth of innovative startups. Valuation was not disclosed, and none of the sources report the size of individual investor cheques.

Readers comparing databases should note how the headline number is built. Tech.eu, I3P and Pitchdrive all describe the event as a €5 million raise. Dealroom’s news feed headlines the same event as a €4.5 million pre-seed, counting equity only. Seedtable converts the total to about $5.7 million. All three are describing one transaction; the difference is whether the grant is included.

What does ORiS actually build?

ORiS builds laser-based wireless power transmission systems. A transmitter converts electricity into a laser beam, points it at a receiver on another platform, and the receiver converts the light back into electricity. The company applies the same core technology to two markets: satellites in orbit and drones in flight.

The long-term product is what the company calls an in-orbit energy distribution grid. Chief executive Andrea Villa summarised the aim in the funding announcement: “Our first step is to make energy in orbit a commodity, available at any time, just as we are used to here on Earth.” In practical terms that means a satellite would no longer need to size its solar arrays and batteries for its worst-case power demand. It could draw extra power from a nearby source when a payload needs it.

The near-term product is LOONA, a wireless recharging platform for drones developed through the NATO DIANA accelerator programme. According to Tech.eu and I3P, the LOONA prototype has transferred power to a hovering drone at distances of more than 100 metres. Pitchdrive describes the benefit as delivering power “without landing or docking”.

ORiS has also looked beyond low Earth orbit. Tech.eu and Pulse 2.0 report that the company completed a feasibility study for Thales Alenia Space on wireless power transmission on the lunar surface, where rovers and equipment in permanently shadowed regions cannot rely on their own solar panels.

Who founded ORiS and what is their background?

ORiS was founded in 2024 by four aerospace engineering graduates of Politecnico di Torino: Andrea Villa (chief executive), Anna Mauro (chief technology officer), Domenico Edoardo Sfasciamuro (chief commercial officer) and Francesco Lopez (chief operating officer). The company is a spin-out of the university.

The team has been supported by two local programmes. ORiS is incubated at I3P, the Politecnico di Torino incubator, and takes part in the European Space Agency Business Incubation Centre (ESA BIC) Turin programme. Turin is an established aerospace cluster, and the Thales Alenia Space study shows the founders have already worked with one of the large primes based in the region.

This is a first-time founding team straight out of an engineering school, not a group of industry veterans. That profile is common in European pre-seed space deals. It usually means investors are underwriting technical depth and speed, and expect to help the company hire commercial and programme-management experience as it grows. The use of proceeds, which starts with expanding the engineering team, is consistent with that reading.

How does ORiS plan to make money?

ORiS has two planned revenue lines: selling or leasing the LOONA drone-charging platform to defence and security users in the near term, and selling power as a service to satellite operators in the longer term. Neither the company nor its investors have disclosed pricing, revenue or signed commercial customers.

The dual-use sequencing is central to the investment case. Koen Christiaens, managing partner at Pitchdrive, wrote that LOONA gives the company a faster path to validating its core wireless power technology and building commercial momentum while it works toward the orbital vision. A drone product can be tested weekly on a range. An orbital product gets one test per launch. Revenue and engineering feedback from the first help pay for the second.

For the orbital business, the unit economics will depend on numbers that do not exist yet in public: end-to-end efficiency of the laser link, the cost of the transmitting satellite, and how much a customer would pay per kilowatt-hour delivered. The buyer’s alternative is to launch bigger solar arrays and batteries. ORiS has to be cheaper than that mass, or enable missions that are otherwise impossible, such as high-power payloads on small buses or operations in eclipse.

What the public record does show is paid technical work for an established prime (the Thales Alenia Space feasibility study), acceptance into NATO DIANA, and a regional grant. Those are validation signals and small sources of non-dilutive funding. They are not yet recurring revenue.

What is the prior funding history of ORiS?

The July 2026 round is the first equity financing ORiS has publicly announced. Before it, the company relied on incubation support from I3P and ESA BIC Turin, the NATO DIANA accelerator and contract work. No earlier priced round has been reported in the sources reviewed for this article.

For a finance reader, the structure is worth a second look. Ten percent of the announced total is non-dilutive. Italian and wider European deep-tech startups routinely blend regional, national and ESA money with venture capital, and the blend lowers the effective cost of capital for founders. It also means that headline figures across countries are not always like-for-like.

How will ORiS use the proceeds?

ORiS says the funding will expand the engineering team, accelerate R&D on critical subsystems, pay for new offices with laboratory and clean-room facilities, and fund flight models for satellite-to-satellite wireless power missions. It will also move LOONA toward a commercial product.

The first orbital milestone is a mission with Dcubed planned for 2027. According to I3P and Pulse 2.0, the goal is to demonstrate wireless power transmission between spacecraft over a distance of 10 metres. That is a deliberately modest target. Ten metres in orbit proves pointing, tracking, conversion and thermal behaviour in the real environment without requiring the long-range beam control that a commercial service would need.

The clean room matters for a practical reason. A company that wants to deliver flight hardware on a 2027 schedule cannot depend entirely on borrowed university facilities. Bringing integration and test in-house costs money up front but shortens iteration cycles, and it is a typical first capital item for a space hardware startup after its first round.

Who competes with ORiS?

The most visible direct competitor is Star Catcher, a US company building satellites that deliver electricity on demand to other satellites by optical power beaming. Star Catcher raised a $65 million Series A in May 2026 led by B Capital, taking its total funding to $88 million, according to Via Satellite.

The gap in capital is large: Star Catcher’s single Series A is more than fourteen times the ORiS equity round. Via Satellite reported that Star Catcher has demonstrated power beaming on Earth and planned a space-based demonstration during 2026. If that demonstration succeeds before the ORiS mission flies in 2027, the US company will hold the first flight heritage in the category.

ORiS has two points of difference in the public record. The first is the drone business, which gives it a second market that does not depend on launch schedules. The second is geography. European institutional and defence customers often prefer or require European suppliers, and ORiS is positioned inside ESA and NATO programmes. Neither point guarantees a market, but both explain why a European fund would back a second entrant instead of conceding the category.

The indirect competitor is the status quo. Satellite manufacturers keep improving solar arrays and batteries, and launch costs per kilogram keep falling. Every improvement there reduces what an operator will pay for beamed power. Companies described in our Starlink business story and Planet Labs company story built large fleets on self-contained power; a power grid has to offer them something their own panels cannot.

Why did investors back ORiS?

Investors backed ORiS on the thesis that power is becoming a binding constraint for satellites, and that a company supplying it as a service could become shared infrastructure. Earlybird venture partner Frédéric du Bois-Reymond said ORiS “is building critical energy infrastructure for orbit, with potential to become foundational for the future space economy.”

Pitchdrive framed its decision in similar terms, describing energy as a bottleneck for the space economy. The firm said ORiS is its first space technology investment, which is a data point in itself: generalist European funds are now willing to co-lead pre-seed rounds in orbital hardware.

The demand side of the thesis is tied to trends covered elsewhere in this series. High-power payloads such as on-board computing, electric propulsion and optical links all raise the power budget of small satellites. Our article on the Ravee Optics seed round covers one such payload class, laser communications terminals. The more power-hungry payloads operators want to fly on small buses, the more valuable an external power source becomes.

The macro backdrop helped. Value Add VC, citing Crunchbase data, reported that space technology startups raised $20.3 billion globally in the first eight months of 2026, already a record year, with Europe accounting for roughly 10 percent. The same analysis cautions that a single $5 billion round made up about a quarter of that total, so the headline overstates how evenly capital is spread.

What are the main risks for ORiS, and what does the round signal?

The main risks are technical proof, timing against a better-funded rival, and an unproven market. Laser power transfer has been shown over more than 100 metres to a drone, but orbit adds relative motion, thermal extremes and strict pointing requirements, and no ORiS hardware has flown yet.

Schedule risk is real. The 2027 demonstration relies on Dcubed and on a launch, neither of which ORiS controls. Hosted and partner missions slip often. A €4.5 million equity round funds a small team for a limited period, so a slip of a year could force the company to raise again before it has orbital data.

Market risk is harder to size. No satellite operator has publicly committed to buying beamed power from ORiS. Customers would need to fit compatible receivers before launch, which means the service only becomes useful once enough satellites are designed for it. That is a classic two-sided adoption problem, similar to the one facing the refuelling and servicing companies discussed in our Astroscale company story.

There is also regulatory and safety exposure. Directed lasers, whether aimed at drones or satellites, attract scrutiny from aviation, defence and space authorities. The dual-use positioning helps with funding and early customers, but it can also bring export-control obligations that slow sales outside allied markets.

Beyond the company itself, the round signals three things for space seed investing: European pre-seed rounds for space hardware have grown to the size of older seed rounds, grants remain a structural part of the stack, and investors increasingly want a terrestrial or defence revenue line alongside the orbital plan.

On size, €4.5 million of equity for a company founded in 2024 would have been labelled a seed round a few years ago. A pre-seed of that scale was followed in October 2026 by an even larger one, covered in our piece on the Foundational pre-seed round in the UK. Labels are drifting upward along with cheque sizes.

On structure, the dual-use pattern recurs across recent deals. ORiS sells drone charging while it builds toward orbit; other startups sell simulators, testing services or ground products first. Investors appear to prefer companies that can show revenue and iteration speed on Earth, and treat the orbital product as the larger option on top. Founders pitching space infrastructure in 2026 should expect to be asked what they can sell before launch. More deal coverage of this kind is collected in our space startup news archive.

Frequently Asked Questions

Sources

• Tech.eu: ORiS raises €5M to build laser-powered energy infrastructure for space
• I3P (Politecnico di Torino incubator): Italian startup ORiS raises 5 million euro
• Pitchdrive: Investing in ORiS, the new way to power space
• Pulse 2.0: ORiS raises €5 million to build in-orbit energy distribution grid
• Seedtable: ORiS pre-seed round profile
• Via Satellite: Star Catcher raises $65M Series A to fuel in-orbit power grid
• Value Add VC: Space tech startup funding hits record $20.3B in 2026