Coimbra-based space traffic management company Neuraspace announced €15.6 million (about $18 million) in fresh funding on 5 August, one of the largest capital injections into a Portuguese space company to date. The package combines a €6 million Series B round from Lince Capital, Explorer Investments and Armilar Venture Partners with €9.6 million awarded under Portugal’s Recovery and Resilience Plan (PRR), the EU-backed national investment programme. The company has now raised roughly €29 million since it was founded in 2020.
The money is earmarked for four things: expanding the company’s AI-driven space traffic management platform, accelerating autonomous mission operations, building out its proprietary optical sensing infrastructure, and — most significantly for readers of this publication — developing NeuraspaceDEF, the dual-use capability line aimed squarely at governmental and defence users across Europe.
From collision alerts to sovereign surveillance
Neuraspace made its name applying machine learning to a congestion problem: tens of thousands of tracked objects in low Earth orbit, and satellite operators drowning in conjunction warnings. Its platform filters and prioritises collision risks and automates avoidance manoeuvre planning. Since 2024 the company has been layering its own hardware under that software — including an optical telescope hosted at Beja Air Base in partnership with the Portuguese Air Force — moving it from analytics vendor toward a sovereign European space domain awareness (SDA) provider.
That word — sovereign — is doing real work. European governments, rattled by dependence on US tracking data, are actively funding independent surveillance of what happens above their heads. Neuraspace’s pitch is that Europe needs its own eyes in the sky, and that a Portuguese firm with AI pedigree and its own sensor network can supply them.
The Nordic-Baltic door is already open
In January, Neuraspace and drone-logistics firm Connect Robotics became the first two Portuguese companies selected for NATO’s DIANA accelerator (Defence Innovation Accelerator for the North Atlantic), joining a 150-company cohort drawn from thousands of applicants. DIANA membership brings an initial €100,000 grant, eligibility for up to €300,000 in follow-on funding, and — the strategically valuable part — access to a network of more than 180 test centres across the Alliance, with a heavy concentration in Sweden, Finland, Norway, Denmark and the Baltic states.
For a company now explicitly building a defence product line, that access matters more than the grant money. The Nordic and Baltic countries are among Europe’s most committed spenders on space-based intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, and both Sweden and Finland bring active national space programmes, Arctic ground-station infrastructure and NATO’s newest defence-industrial ecosystems. A Portuguese SDA provider that validates its sensors and software inside that network is auditioning in front of exactly the procurement offices it needs.
Why this round matters for the corridor
The financing also says something about how Portuguese deep tech gets funded in 2026. The venture portion came entirely from domestic investors — Lince, Explorer and long-time backer Armilar — while the larger tranche came from PRR public money. That blend has been criticised as a crutch, but in dual-use space technology it mirrors how Nordic peers grew: patient public capital de-risking the technology while private investors fund commercialisation. The question for the next round is whether international — including Nordic — defence-tech investors come in, as they have for Portuguese unicorn Tekever’s drone business.
Portugal’s space sector is no longer a curiosity. The country hosts the Atlantic International Research Centre, a growing constellation programme, and a cluster of firms — Neuraspace, Tekever, GMV’s Portuguese operation, LusoSpace — selling into European institutional programmes. Neuraspace itself supplies services under European Space Agency and EU Space Surveillance and Tracking frameworks, the same multilateral structures through which Nordic agencies buy.
What to watch next: whether NeuraspaceDEF lands its first named government customer, whether the company’s DIANA participation converts into test campaigns at Nordic or Baltic ranges, and whether follow-on defence funding — national or European Defence Fund — brings Neuraspace into consortia alongside Nordic primes such as Saab or Kongsberg. Each would turn a promising funding round into a durable corridor story: Portuguese algorithms and optics watching the same orbits Nordic militaries worry about.