Press Release
With the support of PRR - the Recovery and Resilience Plan and NextGeneration EU Funds, the Smart Traffic Management Solution is aimed at Satellite Operators, Insurers, Regulators and Policy Makers.
Coimbra, October 07, 2022 - Neuraspace, a Portuguese start-up developing an advanced system for monitoring and preventing collisions in space, has raised financing for sensor infrastructure and its growth strategy with the support of PRR - the Recovery and Resilience Plan and NextGeneration EU Funds.
After having raised 2,5 million euro from investors in Portugal, with these 25 million euro , Neuraspace now takes a decisive step to establish itself as a key player in STM with a solution that is already being used by satellite operators which plan to significantly increase the presence of their satellites in space.
Morgan Stanley forecasts the space industry, which is today at 350 billion USD, to top 1 trillion dollars by 2040. But this growth is threatened by space debris and an increasing number of active satellites. Satellite operators already pay the price, with a deluge of alerts, most of them false, and therefore performing unnecessary manoeuvres. With an emergency manoeuvre in LEO costing €25,000, a 300-satellite constellation may receive about 580 alerts per year requiring human intervention and satellite manoeuvre, costing €14 million per year.
To address these problems, current approaches face serious challenges:
(1) Lack of data on space debris;
(2) High number of false alerts and a large uncertainty;
(3) Lack of scalability and automation for an increasing number of assets,
Neuraspace is the first AI / ML platform addressing these New Space challenges.
Our customers are satellite operators facing these challenges to perform space operations, and other stakeholders in need of these services (e.g insurance providers for satellite operators, software providers and regulators). This endeavour “Neuraspace – AI fight Space Debris”, will allow the company to acquire sensor infrastructure (radars) and boost the company growth and product development.
The product is a SaaS (Software as a Service) built on three key pillars:
(1) Data Fusion: a persistent and reliable data source with the acquisition of radars infrastructure allowing Neuraspace to have a living catalogue of the objects which the radars are able to track and a catalogue of conjunctions.
(2) Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML), the key to automate complex decision processes.
(3) Manoeuvring Automation: an end-to-end automated 24/7 AI-enabled collision risk prediction with informative insights based on operator constraints and priorities.
The project’s consorcia englobes, besides Neurspace, GMV as end user and 4 research partners (Instituto pedro nunes, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Universidade de Coimbra and Instituto Superior Técnico)
According to Chiara Manfletti, Chief Operations Officer (COO) at Neuraspace, "Our Data fusion and AI approach and technology are a key differentiator to our competitors and a major benefit to our customers. This milestone is a very important step in strengthening both of these pillars. Neuraspace is set out to be a European-born global star in Space Traffic Management and PRR will accelerate us on our path to providing a benchmark Space Traffic Management solution which will ensure that the Space economy can actually grow to be the 1 trillion USD market that it is projected to become in 2040."
About Neuraspace
Neuraspace was established in 2020 with the goal of combating space debris with Artificial Intelligence. Contacts: Carlos Cerqueira I info@neuraspace.com I https://www.neuraspace.com
