Neuraspace lands €15.6M to expand AI space intelligence platform

Space is getting messy. Thousands of satellites now share orbital lanes with debris, dead rocket stages, and increasingly, each other's rivals. Into that crowded picture steps Neuraspace, a Lisbon-based company founded in 2020 by Chiara Manfletti, which just closed a €15.6 million funding round to scale up its AI-driven space monitoring platform.

The money isn't purely private. Lince Capital, Explorer Investments and Armilar Venture Partners put in strategic capital, but Portugal's Recovery and Resilience Plan also chipped in — a reminder that European governments increasingly see orbital awareness as critical infrastructure, not a niche science project. Neuraspace's pitch is straightforward: pull in data from commercial and government sensors, run high-precision orbit calculations, and use AI to flag collision risks, jamming, spoofing and cyber threats before they become disasters.

What's shifted, according to Manfletti, is the nature of the threat itself. A few years ago, the job was mostly about avoiding accidental collisions in an increasingly cluttered sky. Now the line between an accident and an attack has blurred. GNSS spoofing, radio-frequency interference and counterspace maneuvers mean operators need systems that can tell the difference between a wayward piece of debris and something more deliberate, and do it fast enough to matter.

The fresh capital will go toward beefing up the AI platform, pushing further into autonomous mission operations, and expanding Neuraspace's own optical sensor network rather than relying solely on third-party data. There's also continued investment in NeuraspaceDEF, the company's defence-oriented offshoot aimed at government and military customers — a sign that the company is positioning itself as dual-use infrastructure, straddling commercial satellite operators and Europe's defence establishment alike.

Manfletti frames this round as the start of a new phase, one where Neuraspace helps build out Europe's sovereign space-tracking capability rather than depending on American or other foreign systems. Given how contested orbital space has become, and how thin Europe's independent capabilities still are, that ambition looks less like marketing spin and more like a genuine gap someone had to fill.