- Gama moved on from the solar sails to satellite solar arrays and raised €15m in seed funding.
- The funding will go towards Gama setting up its first Wing production line. The company currently has 30 people and plans to add 60 more.
- Gama plans to deliver its first demo unit in summer 2027 via a partnership with Eclipse Space.
Gama, a Paris-based spacetech, just closed €15 million in seed funding to develop solar arrays for satellites.
Transition, Planet A, Draper Associates and Manta Ray have all joined the funding round announced on 12th November. The funds will go toward building the first production line for Wing, Gama’s deployable solar array, at its Ivry-sur-Seine site near Paris, and will also allow the company to hire around 60 more people.
From solar sails to solar arrays
The company was founded in 2022 by Andrew Nutter, Louis de Gouyon Matignon, and Thibaud Elziere. Tech Funding News reported on Gama’s €2 million first funding round, led by BPI, CNES, and several angel investors. Gama Alpha was the company’s first mission and launched in 2023.
Gama found it very difficult to secure funding to move forward with its solar sail business. “We very quickly realised it was going to be complicated to get the funding to make it happen,” Nutter says to TFN, explaining their focus shift to commercial products,
Nutter notes that their experience with solar sails is directly transferable to developing large deployable arrays. Industry contacts have told them that the supply chain is very weak and there is a real need for a scalable solution.
“We need a product, and we need volume,” he says.
Nutter has an entrepreneur’s pedigree: he co-founded Westwing, a home and living e-commerce business that has been on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange since 2018. He’s also been an angel investor in deep tech for over 20 years.
Gama’s CTO Daniel Chapman and VP of Engineering Duncan Adams both spent time on SpaceX’s Starlink hardware and production lines.
Power is the new ceiling
A satellite’s power output depends on the size of its solar array, which has to fit within a rocket fairing. “For years the hard part of space was getting there. Launch has become dramatically cheaper, unlocking vast new applications, and the constraint has moved to power. The next generation of satellites needs far more of it, and every array still has to fit inside a fairing. Wing is built to solve that problem at volume,” says Nutter.
Nutter says the recent momentum is partly due to the SpaceX IPO: “The catalyst has been the SpaceX IPO. Everyone saw how profitable it was to build a constellation. The next thing that unlocks capability and new applications is power.”
Gama notes that the vast majority of satellite manufacturers still go with specialist III-V cells, which are made in very small volumes and can take a year or more to get to you. Gama instead uses high-volume silicon cells originally made for the rooftop market.
The company has a six-month lead time once production starts. Its system, Wing, provides the full power system: an array rotator, power management, optional energy storage, and control software to interface with the customer’s flight computer.
Gama is up against the competition in this area. Rocket Lab, which owns the III-V cell company SolAero, launched silicon solar arrays for use in orbital data centres this year. Redwire, a supplier to NASA and Thales Alenia Space, launched its low-mass ELSA array in March.
Silicon cells are cheaper but less efficient, at around 20% versus approximately 32% for the best germanium-based cells, according to BGR.
Eclipse, Starlink alumni and a factory race
Eclipse Space, based in Redmond, WA and founded by former SpaceX Starlink engineers, is Gama’s only named customer to date. The deal was announced in September. Eclipse will build the satellite bus, and Gama will build the large solar arrays.
Nutter says Gama is also in discussions with other potential customers in Europe and the US. According to him, having a European supply chain benefits US customers who want to sell to European customers.
“Energy in orbit is becoming critical infrastructure, and the way it is produced matters. Gama’s lighter arrays mean less launch mass and less material for every watt in orbit, and they are built efficiently at volume,” said Nick de la Forge, co-founder and general partner at Planet A.
“Europe needs companies that can build strategic space hardware at industrial scale. Gama’s leadership has done this before. … That experience is why they have reached a customer partnership with constellation builders so quickly, and why we are backing them to become the reference supplier of power for the new space economy,” said Ari Helgason, co-founder and general partner at Transition,
The funds will also be used to expand Gama’s in-house testing and to accelerate the launch of its first Wing production line. This is a big challenge for a 30-person company with just one named customer. The demo unit is planned for summer 2027, but Rocket Lab and Redwire already supply arrays. It’s still unclear if Gama’s rooftop-silicon approach will beat competitors on cost per watt.
