Welcome back to the #50 edition of The New Defense Post!
In this edition, we’ll cover:
Spotlights: Isembard Opens What It Calls Central London's Largest Factory Since World War Two; Open Cosmos Raises €300 Million on Five Straight Years of Profitable Growth.
Other News: Mountain Alliance backs Evolved Aerospace after its first government deliveries, and Swarmer agrees to buy Ukrainian ground-robot maker Ratel Robotics for up to $224 million.
Fundraising News: Amsterdam's Fortaegis raises $50 million to put security directly into silicon.
Bonus Section: Guest contributor Jonatan Luther-Bergquist argues Starlink is not jam-proof, just jam-expensive, and that Europe's real near-term answer to connectivity dependency is not more satellites but high-altitude platforms.
Coming up: the Resilience Conference in London this October, use code EDTH25 at registration; the Future of Warfare Summit in Warsaw on Sept 23; and the European Defense Tech Hub x MathWorks Meetup in Dübendorf on Oct 6. |
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Spotlights
1. Isembard Opens What It Calls Central London's Largest Factory Since World War Two
Photo Credit: Isembard
British manufacturing startup Isembard opened a 160,000-square-foot factory and global headquarters in Southwark, central London, on September 14, located only a few minutes from both Westminster and the City. It is the largest factory to open in central London since the Second World War, according to the company. It will produce precision components for aerospace, defense and robotics customers, including Anduril, Babcock and Tekever, running on 3-axis and 5-axis milling machines, turn-mills and wire electrical discharge machines. (Resilience Media, Aero-Mag)
Isembard runs a franchise model for manufacturing, pairing its own and independently operated factories with proprietary software called MasonOS. Founded in late 2024, the company has grown from four factories at the start of this year to fifteen, with the new Southwark site as its sixteenth, across the UK, US and Europe, with revenue up tenfold year on year. It last raised a $50 million Series A in March 2026, led by Union Square Ventures, and is now working on a new funding round. The Financial Times reports the company is valued at around $500 million. (Resilience Media, Charter97)
📰 Our Take: Sixteen factories in under a year is a high number for a company making parts for missiles and submarines. Most precision manufacturers grow one shop at a time, slowly, because quality control in this industry is unforgiving. Isembard skips that by recruiting operators and handing them its own software and standards instead of building and staffing every site itself.
That gets scale fast, but it does not automatically deliver consistency. A component made in a franchised factory has to meet the same tolerance as one made at the new London flagship, and one high-profile opening cannot tell you whether that holds true across all sixteen sites.
2. Open Cosmos Raises €300 Million on Five Straight Years of Profitable Growth
Photo Credit: Open Cosmos
UK-based satellite company Open Cosmos raised €300 million, led by European investors with participation from Lightrock, ETF Partners, British Columbia Investment Management Corporation, Institut Català de Finances, Entrepreneurs First and one other undisclosed pension fund. The company designs, builds and operates satellites for governments and businesses across four platforms: OpenOrbit for manufacturing, OpenConstellation for shared satellite infrastructure, ConnectedCosmos for broadband and IoT links, and DataCosmos for processing the resulting imagery and sensor data. It currently runs four factories across Europe, capable of producing one satellite a day. (Tech.eu, GlobeNewswire)
The company says it has signed more than $370 million in customer contracts over the past three and a half years and reports five consecutive years of profitable growth, though it did not disclose specific revenue or profit figures. Open Cosmos also did not disclose a valuation for this round.
Founded by three Spanish engineers now based in the UK, the company points to rising government demand for sovereign satellite communications, sharpened since Russia's war in Ukraine showed everyone how dependent militaries have become on systems like Starlink. (TrendingTopics, Resilience Media)
🗣 Rafel Jorda Siquier, Open Cosmos Founder and CEO: "Infrastructure alone isn't enough. The real value comes from the intelligence that relays what's happening on Earth in real time." (Manila Times)
📰 Our Take: Five years of profitability is indeed impressive, if true, and one that European space hardware companies rarely get to make. Most are still living from investor money years into their existence, waiting for revenue to catch up with what it costs to build a satellite. Open Cosmos says it crossed that line already, and more than once.
Nobody has actually seen the numbers behind that claim, though. No profit figure, no margin, not even a rough sense of scale. A €300 million raise built partly on an unverified profitability story is still newsworthy.
Other News
Mountain Alliance Backs Evolved Aerospace After Its First Government Deliveries (Mountain Alliance)
Swarmer Agrees to Buy Ukrainian Ground-Robot Maker Ratel Robotics for Up to $224 Million (Swarmer, StockTitan)
Fundraising News
Amount | Name | Round | Category |
|---|---|---|---|
€300M | Growth | Satellite Manufacturing / Space Data | |
€50M | Series C (continuation) | Hardware-Level Encryption / Secure Compute |
Bonus Section: Europe Can’t Launch Its Way Out of the Starlink Problem. It simply has to look up.
Photo Credit: Airbus
In February, Ukraine's terminal whitelist went live and Russian command and control collapsed across parts of the front, with some units losing close to 90% of their connectivity.
Five months later, Reuters reported the counter-move: a purpose-built Starlink jammer, the Volna Kupol Garant, six trailers of dish antennas at $1.5M a complex.
The lesson isn't that Starlink is fragile. It's that a single commercial provider now sits inside the kill chain of every European force that depends on it.
IRIS² doesn't reach full operations until 2031, Ariane 6 flight rates are constrained, and SpaceX has stopped taking new rideshare bookings beyond 2028. Europe can't launch its way out of this dependency.
Read the full case by EDTH co-founder Jonatan Luther-Bergquist in this guest post on The New Defense Post
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