Flagship growth financing vehicle co-leads €1 billion round in Finnish satellite company
EQT, the Swedish investment group running the EU’s Scaleup Europe Fund (SEF), announced the fund’s first investment on Wednesday: Finnish satellite company ICEYE.
The fund cleared its last legal hurdle to begin operations just one day earlier. The investment vehicle is financed by the European Commission and private partners, including Novo Holdings and Dutch pension fund ABP.
SEF is co-leading a €1 billion growth round in a company seen as key to Europe’s sovereign ambitions in space. ICEYE builds and operates Earth-observation satellites and currently works for seven European governments.
The goal for the fund is to plug the regional gap in later stage funding, making large-scale investments into European companies to keep them scaling up on the continent, instead of shifting focus to the US where funding is more plentiful.
