Reflex Aerospace

What they do

Reflex Aerospace designs and builds satellites to order. Rather than selling a fixed catalogue bus, it tailors the satellite platform to each customer's payload and mission, and aims to do so fast through a production facility it calls the MicroFactory, on which construction began in Bavaria in 2024. Its first satellite, SIGI, was assembled in Berlin and launched on SpaceX's Transporter-12 rideshare in January 2025, giving the company flight heritage. A platform called Praetora is in development for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance missions.

Why it matters

European governments increasingly want satellite capacity they control, for imaging, radar, signals and space domain awareness. Satellite buses are a bottleneck: many European operators still buy them from the US. Reflex is positioning itself as a domestic supplier. Its customer list has grown from the Berlin firm MBS in 2023 to Marble Imaging, which signed for the first of a planned 200-satellite Earth observation constellation in 2024, LiveEO's TWINSPECTOR infrastructure-monitoring constellation in January 2026, and in September 2026 its first US customer, Orbital, which chose Reflex as exclusive satellite partner for an orbital data centre constellation. It also works on laser communications in the OPTIMAS project with Navantia under the European Defence Fund.

Products to know

• SIGI: first in-orbit satellite, 2025.
• Praetora: next-generation platform for ISR missions.

The German angle

Reflex was founded in Munich in May 2021 by Walter Ballheimer, Christian Lindener and Alexander Genzel and moved its main base to Berlin, opening an office there in November 2021; it now runs sites in Berlin and Munich. In November 2025 it raised a 50 million euro Series A led by Human Element and Alpine Space Ventures, with Bayern Kapital and High-Tech Gründerfonds, which the company describes as the largest Series A in European New Space to date. It passed 100 employees in February 2026.

Sources

• Reflex Aerospace: A brief history of Reflex
• Berlin Partner: Reflex Aerospace raises 50m