€4m · Seed · Space · Tallinn, Estonia
Golbriak Space, a Tallinn company building laser communication terminals for satellites and airborne platforms, has raised €4m in Seed funding. Tech.eu reports that Join Capital and PhotonVentures co-led the round, with Takeoff participating. The capital will support product development, industrialisation and an expansion of production capacity as the company prepares for larger customer programmes.
Turning optical links into repeatable hardware
Laser links can move data without relying on crowded radio-frequency spectrum, but the commercial bottleneck is not simply proving that light can carry information. Satellite builders need terminals that are compact, straightforward to integrate and reproducible in volume. Golbriak says its ERMES family serves space applications while ARES is designed for aircraft and drones. Both use a common software-defined architecture, and the company's current systems start at 2.5 Gbps.
Golbriak's integration pitch is unusually concrete. Its terminals are designed to rely less on the pointing capability of the host satellite or aircraft, which can reduce work elsewhere in the platform and allow multiple terminals to operate on one vehicle. The company also designs the optics, electronics, mechanics and software in-house. That gives it more control over performance and manufacturability, but it also makes the move from engineering builds to serial production an operational test across several disciplines at once.
The company says it has functioning products, paying customers and advanced discussions covering several thousand terminals. Those are claims about a pipeline, not delivered volume. The near-term milestone is therefore whether Golbriak can translate that demand into repeatable production and qualified customer deployments. Its current hiring shows the practical work ahead: building manufacturing, assembly, integration and test processes in Tallinn rather than merely adding sales capacity.
Scaling from double digits to constellation volumes
Resilience Media reports that Golbriak currently produces a double-digit number of terminals annually and is targeting 200 per month, with a longer-term goal of 300 to 400. The gap between those figures is the investment case and the execution risk. Standardised hardware that can be configured through software could spread engineering cost across more missions; reaching that point still depends on production yield, component supply, test capacity and customers converting negotiations into firm programmes.
Explore this theme
What a successful pilot won't tell you about scale — EUVC · 8 October 2026. The article separates technical proof from production readiness, the same transition Golbriak now has to manage as it builds repeatable manufacturing capacity.
