Our investment in Open Cosmos

The virtue of patience is often given short shrift. “Things may come to those who wait, but only the things left by those who hustle” a remark attributed to Abraham Lincoln that sounds remarkably like something that would be painted onto the wall of a WeWork. But at LocalGlobe, we know that the best founders are absolutely worth waiting for.

Originally from Mallorca, Raf studied Aeronautical and Astronautical engineering at Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya in Barcelona. He spent time with Zero2Infinity, a Spanish start-up harnessing the same technology used in helium weather balloons to float payloads and clients to the edge of space. He also worked as an engineer at Airbus Defence and Space SAS in Seville, a division of Airbus responsible for aerospace products and services.

We first met Rafael over two years ago, in early 2016. He was on a hugely ambitious mission to make satellites more affordable and more accessible to everyone. He’d founded Open Cosmos 6 months earlier, had moved to London and joined Entrepreneur First. As soon as we started chatting it was clear this was a special company. Raf had an intensity and energy level, which combined with his sheer love for the space industry was incredibly compelling. We immediately knew that Raf was the type of founder we wanted to work with. There was just one small issue — he wasn’t raising.

Raf had started Open Cosmos with €500k from an angel investor. He was a frugal founder in a sector full of fat startups. Not frugal because he had to be, but because the company’s DNA had already been set — they hated waste and spent only where they had to. Raf didn’t want the rocket fuel of a funding round just yet.

Over the next few months, as Raf went through Entrepreneur First and on to Harwell Campus, he assembled an incredibly talented team. First, Han Lai, an electronics engineer, who joined as a co-founder. Han was quickly followed by Marc, Jordi and Aleix as systems engineers, Mark as a software engineer, Siddarth as a mechanical engineer, with Boyan and Bastian rounding out the team.

Together this team of 11 have been heads down working at Harwell Campus, a leading science and technology campus, located just south of Oxford. We wanted to work with Raf from the very beginning, but it was on our trip to Harwell that our conviction was confirmed. Harwell is steeped in world firsts: from the discovery of the world’s largest prime number, to the building of Europe’s first energy producing fission reactor and the launch of the transistorised computer. The Harwell Space Cluster is home to over £2 billion of public and private research infrastructure and benefits from the presence of leading public space organisations, including the European Space Agency, RAL Space, Satellite Applications Catapult and UK Space Agency. As Saul and I sat in the canteen having lunch with the team, the conversation ranged from the design of propulsion subsystems to Estonian e-residency and satellite navigation. Raf was not just building an extremely technically talented team, but also a team that enjoyed spending time together.

The space sector is in the middle of a massive shift from thinking in terms of billions of dollars and decades, to thousands of dollars and months. It was clear to see at Harwell — with Open Cosmos who build 4–30kg nano satellites and offer entire missions for $700,000, working alongside a team building a +1,500kg geostationary satellite — price tag north of $100m for manufacturing alone.

We also saw the software platform that the team built, qbapp, where customers can define missions and payloads for their satellite. The platform allows customers to simulate entire missions, access potential launch opportunities and pick a satellite design. From telecommunications for networks of connected devices to optimising agritech production, Open Cosmos makes satellites more affordable and accessible for customers across industries.

Over the past two years, Rafael and his team have begun to deliver their vision of a one-stop-shop for launch and satellite operations. We watched the live feed of the first Open Cosmos satellite launch in our office in April 2017. A nano satellite that was designed and delivered in a record time of six months.