Morpheus Space: making space for everyone

“Space is critical infrastructure for our society, with many different applications. From earth observation to communication, space helps us connect the world and understand it better. To figure out climate change, agriculture, transport…” explains Daniel Bock, CEO and co-founder of Morpheus, a company that is redefining space mobility.

ACTION IN SPACE, FLEXIBILITY ON EARTH

Daniel and his team are developing an all-in-one satellite mobility platform that includes the hardware with their scalable propulsion solutions and all the software behind it. “Essentially we help satellites move in space,” he says. “We’re moving away from large, single, expensive satellites to constellations and networks of hundreds of smaller, affordable satellites. There’s a lot more going on. But these constellations are planned many years in advanced, built and finally deployed into space without actually being very responsive to changing circumstances. That doesn’t really address the needs of the rapidly changing world we live in. But with our technologies, we are now bringing flexibility to business models and means to react on events down on Earth. We are doing this by providing automated mobility solutions for satellites that can simply rearrange the shape of these constellations in a dynamic way — even when the satellites are already in space. Our technology helps prevent satellite collisions in space and reduce space debris which is one of the biggest challenges of the space industry.”

UNIVERSITY SPIN-OFF

Daniel was doing a PhD in space engineering, at TU Dresden, looking at electric propulsion, but that project was interrupted: “I never finished the PhD because Morpheus came in between,” he explains. Meeting his co-founder at university, the company spun-off from a university project in 2018. Today, the company has costumers all over Europe and North America, and in 2020, received an equity investment from VSquared, a venture capital firm backed by the EIF and the EU, which allowed the team to finalise the hardware product development, initiate the software development and expand to the US.

SCALING & DEMOCRATISING

Now that the company has established itself, the next step is scale: “We’ll soon be extending our production capacity, to mass produce our hardware, grow the business and capture the market. At the same time, we’re working on bringing it all together in one holistic platform, decreasing technical barriers, and making it more user-friendly, democratising access to space.”

Company: Morpheus Space (Dresden, Germany)

Sector: space

Number of employees: >50

Financial Intermediary: Vsquared Ventures

Financing purpose: product development

EIF financing: InnovFin Equity, ERP, EGF, LfA

For further information about EIF intermediaries in Greece, please refer to: http://www.eif.org/what_we_do/where/el