IENAI Space funding news – Madrid-based IENAI Space Secures €3.9 Million in Funding

By early 2025, the business hopes to begin commercial deliveries of its thruster. Several Spanish investors, including Inveready, WA4STEAM, DPM, GED Conexo Ventures, and CDTI—a government-backed investor that matches private investment—have joined the company.

The increase follows a significant product accomplishment: IENAI's electric propulsion system "ATHENA," a 0.5U thruster designed for spacecraft weighing between 3 kg and 50 kg, successfully fired for nearly 400 hours. It is an adaptive thruster based on electrospray powered by nanotechnology.

This is the longest firing of an ionic-liquid electrospray thruster in Europe, as independently confirmed by ESA. A successful preliminary design review (PDR) with ESA included the firing test.

Approximately thirty organisations participated in the beta test of their software package, "360," which is designed for space mobility and mission analysis and design. As part of their "IRIS programme," the company is now onboarding startups from a variety of incubation and acceleration programmes throughout Europe in collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS).

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With the money, the company plans to construct new facilities to house its expanding staff, increase the number of people using its software tools, and expedite the commercialization of its propulsion system.

In order to increase its workforce from 22 to 30 employees this year, IENAI Space also intends to hire more personnel to cover all departmental needs. In addition, two new PhDs will join the present pool of seven PhD applicants, who are overseen by six PhD full-time staff members, in order to boost the institution's development of science and technology.

The in-orbit demonstration of IENAI Space ATHENA propulsion system aboard the Cassini in-orbit demonstration (IOD) and in-orbit verification (IOV) mission, developed under the European Space Agency with ISISPACE, is the next step on the road to commercial production.

Cassini is a component of a Horizon Europe-funded initiative to boost the EU space industry's competitiveness through a number of cutting-edge technology tests from different European suppliers for low-Earth orbit (LEO) demonstration.

Dr.Daniel Pérez Grande, CEO and co-founder of IENAI Space, commented: “The funding result is a fantastic achievement and a testament to the amazing efforts made by our team every single day. It allows us to consolidate the next steps towards commercialization of our core products, which in turn enables us to substantially grow the business. We really can’t wait for our clients to get their hands on ATHENA, our electric propulsion system. It will offer them world-class efficiency, compactness, and customisation options to cater for a wide range of space missions. We’re also very excited for the future of IENAI. In 2024 and 2025 we are expecting to kick-start a number of key collaborations with established players in the market, make progress on our current ESA projects. We’ll also keep maturing and validating our propulsion technologies, and we’ll be starting the development of more novel products for the space mobility market.”

Due to agreements with CNM-CSIC (Instituto de Microelectrónica de Barcelona) and Uppsala University, the company already has clean-room facilities in Madrid, Barcelona, and Uppsala, Sweden. For this reason, the company intends to expand its current manufacturing and testing facilities throughout Europe.

About ienai SPACE

ienai SPACE seeks to provide as a one-stop shop for mission analysis for nanosatellites and highly efficient ionic-liquid electric propulsion systems. They will offer propulsion modules that are plug-and-play compatible, similar to CubeSats, but specifically tailored for every platform and mission: from 2U to 12U; from RAAN-spacing to Earth-Moon transits or de-orbiting (to help with space debris containment).