UNIVITY, the Paris-based space-tech startup developing a Very Low Earth Orbit (VLEO) 5G satellite network, has closed a €27 million Series A to finance the construction of its first operational demonstrators. The round, announced on 23 April 2026, was led by Blast and Expansion, with participation from Bpifrance’s Deeptech 2030 fund on behalf of the French state and two family offices. The financing takes UNIVITY’s cumulative funding to more than €67 million.
Founded in 2022 by chief executive Charles Delfieux, UNIVITY is betting that Europe’s telecom operators would rather buy wholesale capacity from a neutral European counterparty than depend on U.S.-owned constellations. The company’s answer is a VLEO fleet operating below 375 kilometres — significantly lower than SpaceX’s Starlink — offering lower latency, smaller ground terminals and, critically, a French industrial supply chain.
Inside the round
Blast led the Series A alongside Expansion, the deep-tech fund run by Charles Beigbeder. The state-backed Deeptech 2030 fund managed by Bpifrance participated as part of the wider France 2030 programme, which has already channelled substantial non-dilutive support to the company. Two unnamed family offices rounded out the syndicate.
The round builds directly on UNIVITY’s September 2025 milestone, when it secured a €31 million contract from CNES — France’s national space agency — under the €44 million uniShape programme. Combined with earlier grant and equity financing, that government backing is now serving as the anchor for a scalable private round. The composition mirrors a pattern Sesamers has tracked across European deep-tech in the past eighteen months: public capital takes the first technology risk, private capital then scales the commercial deployment.
“UNIVITY represents an exceptional opportunity supporting breakthrough innovation,” said Charles Beigbeder of Expansion.
What the company is building
VLEO is the strategic bet. By operating satellites at roughly a third of Starlink’s altitude, UNIVITY can cut round-trip latency to levels that approach fixed broadband, reduce the aperture and power required by user terminals, and — perhaps most importantly for the Direct-to-Cell use case — deliver enough link budget to reach unmodified smartphones. The physics are attractive; the engineering is hard. Lower orbit means higher atmospheric drag, shorter satellite lifetimes and more aggressive station-keeping.
The Series A capital will support the execution of the uniShape programme: two VLEO-based 5G NTN satellite demonstrators of more than 250 kilograms each, alongside the ground infrastructure needed to validate an end-to-end high-throughput 5G NTN service. Crucially, the demonstrators will also test Direct-to-Cell smartphone connectivity, putting UNIVITY in the same competitive frame as Starlink’s partnership with T-Mobile and AST SpaceMobile’s BlueBird constellation.
UNIVITY has already flown a ~20kg first payload, validating components and giving engineers flight heritage before the far larger demonstrator build. Manufacturing of the next-generation satellites is planned near Toulouse, inside France’s long-established aerospace cluster.
“We’ve reached a point where space is a viable alternative” to terrestrial networks, Delfieux told tech.eu, framing the company’s proposition as a complement to rather than a replacement for 5G on the ground. “We aim to deploy shared space infrastructure that others can use.”
The wholesale bet
UNIVITY’s business model is deliberately different from Starlink’s. Rather than selling directly to end-users, it is targeting wholesale capacity contracts with telecom operators — effectively renting them orbital bandwidth the way a fibre-wholesale company rents dark fibre. For European operators who worry about disintermediation by Starlink, a VLEO constellation they can brand and integrate into their own service bundles is a compelling alternative.
It is also a politically resonant one. European telecom and defence ministries have become increasingly uneasy about the strategic dependence created by foreign satellite constellations. Sovereign connectivity is a stated priority of the EU Space Act and the European Defence Industrial Strategy. UNIVITY’s investor syndicate — blending a venture platform (Blast), a deep-tech specialist (Expansion), a state-aligned fund (Bpifrance) and patient family capital — is precisely the mix that European sovereignty strategies tend to produce.
Where it fits in the European funding picture
The Series A follows a strong run of European spacetech rounds tracked by Sesamers, including ATMOS Space Cargo’s €25.7 million Series A earlier this week for sovereign return-from-orbit capability. Taken together, these deals sketch an increasingly coherent European space stack: sovereign launch, sovereign connectivity, sovereign downmass, and — through NCOS-aligned defence tech funds — sovereign Earth observation.
At €27 million, UNIVITY’s round is sized for demonstrators rather than a full constellation. The next milestone is a successful on-orbit validation of the uniShape satellites and a first wholesale contract with a tier-one European operator. If those materialise, the company will be on the runway for a Series B likely to run into the hundreds of millions, and for Europe to have, for the first time, a credible home-grown wholesale space broadband provider.
Source: Tech.eu — UNIVITY raises €27M to build sovereign space connectivity
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