Leanspace, a company building the future digital infrastructure of the space industry, announced its launch out of stealth mode with several major customers. A Seraphim Space backed start-up, it has already raised over 2 million Euro in seed funding from institutional and angel investors.
Its first offering is the Leanspace Cloud, a technology enabling space organizations to easily build integrated software ecosystems to run space missions. It will be launched at the SpaceTechExpo in Bremen, Germany, via a public demonstration event in partnership with ClearSpace, the International Astronautical Federation (IAF) and the International Space University (ISU).
The commercialization of the space industry is bringing a myriad of new and innovative space programs, ranging from small satellite constellations, to launchers, to in-orbit services. As every use case is unique, they all require setting up new, custom, ground software infrastructures to manage their operations.
“I’ve spent the last decade building and selling ground segment software, from bespoke solutions to off-the-shelf products. The truth is: 80% is always the same!“ explains Guillaume Tanier, co-founder & CEO of Leanspace. “What is specific for each space mission is the use case, the 20%. But, for example, people rebuild their ground segment from scratch each time. In the era of commercialization of space, it does not make sense anymore.”
The Leanspace cloud provides the common building blocks of space software, accessible in a Platform-as-a-Service model. Engineers will find a large collection of standardized, generic web services that they can use through simple APIs. With them, they can build bespoke software systems for example for monitoring and control, mission planning, satellite testing, or configuration management. They can do it themselves; 5x faster, 2x cheaper, easily and in a scalable way. In one word, lean.
Every space player invests today to leverage the benefits of digital transformation: scalability of the cloud, digital engineering, and modular, iterative developments. But the missing piece is the ability to link together tools, data and third party services, in a seamless, integrated ecosystem.
“Today, space organizations set up their ground infrastructures by mixing technologies: off-the-shelf products, open source libraries, and countless in-house developments. The result is a fragmented and complex infrastructure that requires highly manual interventions and doesn’t scale,” said Alvaro Alonso Ruiz, co-founder and CCO. “This problem has already been solved in many other industries, just like Shopify for ecommerce. But nobody has done it for space, until now.”
Leveraging the Leanspace Cloud makes it possible to create collaborative systems which operate as a Single source of Truth, across assets, teams and business phases. It enables digital processes and more business agility than ever before. In one word, we make the industry lean.
Leanspace empowers the entire industry. Space operators can now build their own systems, step by step, from small applications to entire ground segments, but much easier and faster. Software integrators can now create smarter solutions for their customers. Providers of off-the-shelf products can now easily adapt and extend their portfolio to reach new markets.
Leanspace’s customer base includes notables such as ClearSpace, an ESA-funded space debris removal company, and many others from a variety of use cases: satellite constellations, space-as-a-service, micro-launchers and system integrators.
With the commercialization of the industry, every organization needs to drastically reduce costs, time and be future-proof. “This is the only way to allow space businesses to thrive and together build the future space economy.” highlights Guillaume Tanier. “We are providing them the technology to do it.”