Why We Invested in North Propulsion

Space is having a moment. Not the movie kind — the infrastructure kind.

By 2030, nearly 100,000 satellites will be in orbit. That number is not speculative; it is already locked in through government programmes, commercial constellations, and defense contracts. The question is no longer whether space becomes critical infrastructure. It already is. The question is who builds the components that make it all work.

North Propulsion is one of those companies.

The problem nobody talks about

When most people think about getting a satellite into orbit, they think about the rocket — the dramatic launch, the countdown, the plume of fire. But the rocket only gets the satellite to roughly the right neighbourhood. Getting it to the exact operational orbit, and keeping it there, is the job of the satellite's own propulsion system.

Here is where it breaks down.

The dominant propulsion technology today — electric propulsion — is slow. Not a little slow. After launch, it can take six to twelve months of constant thrusting to push a satellite from its drop-off point to where it actually needs to be. Every day a satellite spends in transit is a day it is not generating revenue for the operator. At scale — hundreds or thousands of satellites — this becomes a systemic problem. The bottleneck is not the rocket. It is the propulsion.

What North Propulsion has built

North Propulsion has developed a liquid chemical propulsion system that solves this in two ways.

First, speed. Their system gets satellites to operational orbit in days, not months. For satellite operators under commercial or government pressure to activate quickly, this is transformative.

Second, supply chain. Electric propulsion systems often have nine to twelve month manufacturing lead times. North Propulsion has designed a system that is fast and inexpensive to produce, meaning operators can hold inventory and deploy quickly rather than waiting for components to arrive.

The technical credibility behind this is not marketing. ESA — the European Space Agency — has directly validated that North Propulsion has cracked the hardest part of green chemical propulsion. The founder, Rasmus, has over a decade in the field, including launching European rockets and leading ignition system design at Orbex.

This is not a pitch deck. It is a working system with ESA behind it.

Why now is the right moment

Two forces are converging.

The first is regulatory. Satellite operators are increasingly required to have propulsion systems that can perform controlled de-orbiting at end of life. Governments and agencies are mandating this to avoid the growing debris problem in low Earth orbit. That makes propulsion less of a nice-to-have and more of a licence-to-operate.

The second is geopolitical. Europe is serious about reducing its dependence on non-European technology in critical infrastructure — especially anything touching defence and space. North Propulsion runs a fully European supply chain and is completely free of ITAR restrictions, the US export control regulations that create friction for non-American buyers. For European satellite manufacturers and defence contractors, this matters enormously.

Both forces are pushing in the same direction, and North Propulsion is positioned at the intersection of both.

Why we said yes

We do not invest in space companies as a rule. We are sector-agnostic. But one of our core beliefs is that something in the deal has to be exceptional — the team, the idea, the timing, or the industry dynamics. Here, all four are working together at once.

Rasmus has the right background for this problem. The technology has real external validation. The regulatory and geopolitical tailwinds are structural, not cyclical.

The satellites are coming. We are glad they will have good propulsion.