[FINANCIAL] Earth Intelligence ·
Satellite Data · Deep Tech / Space —
April 6, 2026 — Series B COMPLETED
Xoople Raises $130M Series B — Spain's
7-Year Stealth Earth Intelligence Startup Hits Unicorn and Begins Commercial
Launch
Seven years in development, now ready to change how AI
understands the physical world: Madrid-based Xoople closes a $130 million
Series B led by Nazca Capital — bringing total funding to $225 million and
entering unicorn territory — and simultaneously announces a sensor
manufacturing agreement with US defense giant L3Harris Technologies for the
company's own satellite constellation designed to produce the world's most
precise continuous Earth observation data for AI and enterprise applications.
DEAL SNAPSHOT
|
ROUND AMOUNT $130 Million — Series B |
ANNOUNCED April 6, 2026 |
|
POST-MONEY VALUATION Unicorn territory (CEO
confirmed; exact figure undisclosed) |
TOTAL FUNDING $225 Million |
|
LEAD INVESTOR Nazca Capital (Madrid) |
HARDWARE PARTNER L3Harris Technologies
(optical sensors for Xoople satellite constellation) |
THE PARTIES
|
LEAD INVESTOR Nazca Capital + MCH Private
Equity + CDTI + Buenavista Equity Partners + Endeavor Catalyst Nazca Capital
(Madrid): Spain's largest private equity fund specializing in aerospace and
defense; received €294M commitment from CDTI and €40M from the European
Investment Fund — making it a uniquely credible lead for a space and Earth
data company. MCH Private Equity (Spain): diversified private equity. CDTI
(Centro para el Desarrollo Tecnológico Industrial): technology development
fund backed by the Spanish government, a CDTI institutional investor.
Buenavista Equity Partners: Spanish private equity. Endeavor Catalyst: the
co-investment fund of global startup network Endeavor, focused on high-impact
tech entrepreneurs. |
COMPANY / RECIPIENT Xoople SL Madrid,
Spain-based data infrastructure company. CEO and co-founder Fabrizio
Pirondini. Co-founder background: satellite and geospatial data expertise.
Founded 2019; spent 7 years in stealth developing technology. Mission: build
"Earth's System of Record" — a continuous, AI-native data layer for
monitoring and understanding the physical world in real time. Current data
platform: aggregates satellite imagery from government spacecraft (ESA
Sentinel-2, NASA, etc.) and processes it for enterprise use cases. Future
constellation: proprietary optical satellite constellation (sensors to be
built by L3Harris Technologies) designed to produce data "two orders of
magnitude more precise" than existing commercial systems. Already
embedded in Microsoft Azure and Esri (the dominant enterprise geospatial
platforms). Starting commercial launch Q2 2026. |
DEAL OVERVIEW
Xoople closed its
$130 million Series B on April 6, 2026, led by Nazca Capital with participation
from MCH Private Equity, CDTI, Buenavista Equity Partners, and Endeavor
Catalyst — bringing the company's total funding to $225 million and pushing its
valuation into unicorn territory. Simultaneously with the funding announcement,
Xoople announced a hardware partnership with L3Harris Technologies (one of the
world's leading defense and aerospace electronics companies) to design and
build the optical sensors for Xoople's planned satellite constellation.
This is one of
the most significant European deep tech fundraises of early 2026, and notably
one of the largest space-related rounds to come out of Spain. CEO Fabrizio
Pirondini is positioning Xoople not as an Earth observation company (the
framing of Planet, BlackSky, or Airbus Defence) but as a data infrastructure
company — specifically, the company that will build the "system of record
for the physical world," analogous to what Salesforce did for CRM or what
cloud platforms did for software data. The key differentiation: Xoople's data
is designed from the ground up for AI model training and inference, not for
human visual interpretation.
"Every major computing era creates a new system of record. CRMs
gave companies a system of record for customers. Cloud gave them one for
software. Xoople will give them one for the physical world."
— Fabrizio
Pirondini, CEO & Co-Founder, Xoople
THE AI GROUND TRUTH PROBLEM
As AI models
proliferate across industries — autonomous vehicles, logistics, agriculture,
insurance, infrastructure monitoring, climate modeling — there is a fundamental
shortage of high-quality, continuously updated, scientifically precise data
about the physical world. Most enterprise AI models are either trained on stale
satellite imagery (months or years old) or on imagery designed for human visual
interpretation (JPEG-compressed, not calibrated for machine learning). Xoople's
thesis is that the AI era requires a fundamentally different data product:
continuous, calibrated, precise, machine-learning-native data from Earth's
surface.
The L3Harris
sensor partnership is particularly significant: L3Harris has built some of the
most advanced optical imaging systems in the US intelligence community and
commercial space industry. Commissioning L3Harris to build Xoople's sensors
signals that Xoople is targeting scientific-grade precision rather than
low-cost consumer imagery. Use cases already in production on third-party data:
supply chain monitoring (tracking shipping container movements), agricultural
crop health, infrastructure stress monitoring, insurance natural disaster
verification, and government emergency planning.
INVESTORS & PARTNERS
Lead
(Series B): Nazca Capital
Co-Investors:
MCH Private Equity + CDTI (Spain
government) + Buenavista Equity Partners + Endeavor Catalyst
Hardware
Partner (Satellite Sensors): L3Harris
Technologies
Distribution
Partnerships: Microsoft Azure
(embedded) + Esri (embedded)