Gama raises €15M seed to put more power inside the standard rocket fairing

Gama (Paris) has closed a €15 million seed led by Transition, with Planet A, Draper Associates, and Manta Ray participating. The company designs and manufactures Wing — a deployable solar array for satellites — and will use the round to open a production line at its Ivry-sur-Seine factory, hire around 60 engineers, and expand testing capacity.

When launch cost falls, power becomes the constraint

Rocket economics have shifted by an order of magnitude over the past decade. The cost per kilogram to low Earth orbit has fallen far enough that constellation programmes once justified only by defence or telecoms budgets are now reachable for commercial Earth observation, weather monitoring, and broadband. That shift has unlocked categories — but it has also exposed the next bottleneck.

The spacecraft applications that now make financial sense demand electricity budgets that existing solar technology struggles to meet inside the standard envelope of a rocket fairing. Wings that deploy large enough to generate the required power have to fold, survive launch loads, and unfurl reliably in orbit — while keeping cost and production time compatible with a commercial market. Wing is Gama's answer: an array designed from first principles not merely to work in orbit, but to be manufacturable at the pace and price the next constellation wave demands.

The founding team reflects unusual breadth for a hardware-first company at this stage. Andrew Nutter (CEO) brings engineering and operations depth; Louis de Gouyon Matignon brings aerospace-sector experience; Thibaud Elzière, the co-founder of eFounders who backed Yousign and Swan from early innings, brings the product instinct and go-to-market discipline that most deep-hardware teams typically lack before a Series A.

Transition as lead: the energy infrastructure framing

Transition, the climate-focused VC that led the round, invests at the intersection of decarbonisation and infrastructure — a mandate wide enough to encompass grid-scale storage, industrial efficiency, and, evidently, space hardware. The investment thesis is explicit: high-power satellite infrastructure underpins the energy transition stack. Earth-observation satellites that track methane leaks and deforestation at commercial resolution, low-orbit broadband that substitutes for terrestrial cable in remote regions, and next-generation precision agriculture data services all depend on satellites with power budgets current technology cannot reliably provide.

Planet A (climate-focused, Berlin) reinforces that framing; Draper Associates (Tim Draper's direct fund, San Mateo) adds US deep-tech risk appetite and a network that spans launch customers on both sides of the Atlantic.

The Ivry-sur-Seine production test

The €15 million goes primarily into the Wing production line at Ivry-sur-Seine, a site south-east of Paris with an established aerospace manufacturing base. Hiring approximately 60 engineers is the execution risk: space hardware talent is thin in France outside the primes, qualification timelines are long, and the difference between a flight-tested prototype and a production line is precisely where most hardware startups find the gap between raised capital and delivered product.

Gama's argument — that Wing was designed from day one to be manufacturable, not merely functional — is a proposition the production ramp will test over the next 18 months.