Welcome to SpaceTech Ireland — a fast, Ireland-focused read on the space economy.

This week: a free ESA Phi-Lab funding webinar tomorrow morning that's aimed squarely at companies who've never thought of themselves as space firms; Ubotica's €9.6m raise to take its satellite AI to sea, chasing the shadow fleets and cable-cutters worrying European governments; and students at UCC writing themselves into the record books with Ireland's first two-stage student rocket. Plus Irish space sector jobs

June 25, 2026

Live: Friday 26 June, 10:30am IST (11:30am CEST) · Free · Registration required · Register here

If you read one thing in this issue, make it this - and act today, because it runs tomorrow morning.

ESA Phi-Lab Ireland, run by Irish Manufacturing Research, is hosting a one-hour webinar on its Open Call 2026, titled "How Irish Companies Can Lead Europe's Ambitions in Space."

It's aimed squarely at companies that don't yet think of themselves as space firms - advanced materials, additive manufacturing, precision engineering and smart-systems businesses looking to take a first or next step into the sector with ESA support.

Phi-Lab Ireland manager Rob Conway-Kenny will walk through the Open Call 2026 opportunity, the eligibility criteria, what a strong application looks like, and the four conditions that decide whether a bid succeeds.

Alongside him, Peter O'Connor, Space Technical Program Manager at Ubotica Technologies - one of two companies funded in the 2025 Open Call — will talk through Ubotica's journey through the programme. There's time for questions.

🔗: Webinar | ESA Phi Lab Open Call June 2026 | Registration

Dublin's Ubotica Technologies has raised $11m (€9.6m) to scale its satellite-based maritime intelligence service. The round was led by Dublin's Act Venture Capital and Greencode Ventures, with existing backer Atlantic Bridge following on.

Conventional Earth-observation satellites work like cameras: they photograph the planet and beam the raw images down for someone on the ground to process hours later. Ubotica's approach runs the analysis on the satellite itself, so the spacecraft decides what matters before it talks to Earth.

The company calls the result "Live Earth Intelligence", branded SPACE:AI. It is already in service. Ubotica's AI is deployed on more than 30 Earth-observation satellites, and its CogniSAT-6 demonstrator has flown the approach in orbit.

The commercial target now is maritime security, packaged as a service Ubotica calls Live Maritime Intelligence (LMI). European governments are increasingly concerned about activity near undersea communications cables, offshore energy assets and pipelines, and about the "shadow fleets" moving sanctioned cargo with their transponders switched off. In a single orbital pass, Ubotica says, one of its satellites can identify dozens of vessels at once and separate the ships broadcasting their AIS position from the "dark" vessels that have gone quiet. That operation can flag a suspicious ship in near real time rather than days later.

"Live Maritime Intelligence predicts where risk is emerging, tasks the right satellites and sensors, and delivers decision-grade intelligence in minutes, giving security teams the speed and efficiency they need to act. This investment allows us to bring LMI to market at scale," said CEO Fintan Buckley.

Buckley leads a company founded by engineers out of Movidius, the Dublin AI-chip firm Intel bought for a reported $400m in 2016 - so running heavy computation on small, power-limited hardware is familiar ground. With the new funding, the task is to turn the technology into a recurring commercial service.

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ProvenMetal, co-founded by Johnny Doyle and Will Carkner, has been accepted into Y Combinator's Summer 2026 batch, the San Francisco accelerator behind Stripe, Airbnb and Dropbox. The pair will spend three months refining the company before pitching investors at Demo Day in September.

ProvenMetal builds benchtop X-ray systems that use AI to inspect circuit boards and catch faults before the electronics are deployed. Its target markets are aerospace, medical devices and defence - sectors where a hidden flaw on a board can mean a failed satellite or worse.

Doyle and Carkner had previously built Syncra, a building-management IoT company, and when they first applied to YC they were told the team was strong but the idea wasn't ambitious enough. They switched theses, booked flights an hour before their first interview, and returned two weeks later with five letters of intent and a working prototype after more than 30 conversations with manufacturers.

Both are alumni of Patch, the OpenAI- and Stripe-backed talent community based at Dublin's Dogpatch Labs.

The UCC Rocketry and Space Exploration Society (UCC RSES) has designed, built and successfully launched a two-stage rocket - the first time a student team in Ireland has done so.

The achievement is all about stage separation: getting a spent first stage to cleanly drop away and a second stage to take over mid-flight. It's one of the trickiest manoeuvres in rocketry, and it was the main objective of the launch. The separation system the team has just proven feeds into Cerberus, their upcoming mission in Scotland, with the next launch only days away.

By the team's own account it took months of design, manufacturing, testing and problem-solving, and was "hard, stressful, and full of challenges".

Ireland’s space-talent pipeline starts here - students building and delivering the country's first two-stage student launch.

"Our unique approach… brings AI-native, predictive monitoring capabilities using satellites and other sensing assets in the most efficient way possible, driven by the risk landscape as it is and as it is predicted to develop. We look forward to having a real impact on improving maritime security" - Sean Mitchell, Chairman & CCO, Ubotica Technologies

“The preparation was hard, stressful, and full of challenges, but nothing could stop us from pushing forward…This is a huge milestone for UCC RSES and student rocketry in Ireland” - Hleb Slyusar, a member of UCC’s Rocketry and Space Exploration Society team that this week became the first in Ireland to launch a two-stage student rocket (see feature).

🚀 Dublin's Celtonn - the female-led, NovaUCD-based mmWave RF startup - attended the SpaceBR Show in Sao Paulo, building Earth-observation and connectivity ties across South America.

🚀 ESA has set dates for this year's Open Days, running for the first time across six establishments Europe-wide — including the UK site opening to the public for the first time, and an extra weekend day at the Paris HQ after 2025 demand

OHB (Germany) - Share sale - €510.7m - German space group OHB is raising up to €510.7m through a share sale (announced 22 June) to fund industrialisation, launch vehicles and a wave of mergers, acquisitions and partnerships across Europe. The Irish angle: OHB is a customer of Dublin's Réaltra, which built the PayLoad Interface Unit for OHB's PLATO spacecraft, a €3.4m deal that was, at the time, the largest single ESA-science contract ever awarded to an Irish company. PLATO’s launch is planned for late this year or early 2027.

ESA's 'University of Tomorrow' call is open

ESA Space Solutions has opened a Call for Proposals for space-enabled solutions in higher education - democratisation of data, virtual labs, serious gaming, remote learning, connected campuses. Selected Kick-start Activities get 75% ESA funding, up to €75,000 each.

ESA BASS rolling open call: proof-of-concept & pilot projects

ESA's Business Applications and Space Solutions (BASS) runs an always-open invitation for businesses to fund a space-enabled application or service for any market. Proof-of-Concept studies de-risk and validate the opportunity (MVP stage); Pilot Projects test the service with real customers in-market.

Looking ahead - DTIF Call 8, opens 1 October. Separately from ESA, the Disruptive Technologies Innovation Fund opens its eighth call on 1 October, with €40m available; applications run to 31 January 2027. DTIF backs commercial deployment of disruptive technologies through research-industry collaboration, and has awarded over €530m across seven calls since 2018.

https://enterprise.gov.ie/en/what-we-do/innovation-research-development/disruptive-technologies-innovation-fund/

PICTURE: On 23 June, SpaceX flew Starfall for the first time - a disc-shaped capsule, three metres wide, designed to carry cargo to orbit and bring it back through the atmosphere to a splashdown at sea. The goal is to make manufacturing things in space, and returning them cheaply, an everyday reality.

Next week: more funding, contracts, and careers in Ireland's space economy - delivered weekly.

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