ORiS closes €5M pre-seed to build laser-based wireless power transmission infrastructure for the space economy

ORiS (Turin) has closed a €5 million pre-seed round comprising €4.5 million in equity — co-led by Earlybird and Pitchdrive, with Galaxia, Vento, and Piemonte Next Fund participating — plus a €500,000 non-dilutive grant from the Piedmont Region. The announcement was made 21 July 2026.

The company was founded in February 2024 within the ESA BIC Turin programme at the Politecnico di Torino. The founding team — Andrea Villa (CEO), Anna Mauro (CTO), Domenico Edoardo Sfasciamuro (CCO), and Francesco Lopez (COO) — are aerospace engineering graduates of the Politecnico, advised by Professor Stefano Mauro. ORiS is developing laser-based wireless power transmission (WPT) technology, with its primary application in energy distribution between spacecraft in orbit.

The power constraint in space

Satellites carry solar panels sized to their launch configuration and batteries sufficient for eclipse periods. Once deployed, they cannot take on more power: their energy budget is fixed at launch. As satellite missions become more computationally intensive — higher-resolution imaging, AI inference on board, longer operational lives — that fixed energy budget becomes increasingly constraining.

ORiS's thesis is that laser-based WPT can resolve this structurally. A power-rich spacecraft or dedicated relay satellite could transmit energy as a directed laser beam to a power-constrained vehicle, received and converted by a photovoltaic cell on the target. The energy transfer would effectively decouple a satellite's compute and sensing ambition from its at-launch solar panel area.

The practical challenges are significant: beam pointing accuracy at orbital velocities, conversion efficiency of laser-to-electricity, thermal management, and regulatory approval for high-energy lasers in orbit are all unsolved at commercial scale. Which is why the €5M pre-seed funds R&D and flight model development, not commercial deployment. A 2027 in-orbit demonstration with DCUBED via the ARAQYS-D3 mission will be the company's first technical proof point — whether WPT works in the actual space environment, not in a lab.

LOONA and the terrestrial bridge

Alongside the space programme, ORiS is developing LOONA, a wireless charging platform for drones using the same laser power-beaming technology. Sources describe the application as civilian-focused: extending drone flight time without physical charging infrastructure, removing a recurring operational constraint for commercial drone operations. LOONA could generate early commercial revenue ahead of the 2027 space demonstration, providing runway optionality before the company's core thesis is technically verified.

Earlybird's co-lead position — one of Europe's most active deep-tech early-stage investors — is the most meaningful external signal in the round. Whether the 2027 demonstration produces flight data that justifies a substantially larger Series A ask will determine whether ORiS is building toward a genuinely new infrastructure layer for the space economy or toward a technically elegant demonstration with a long commercialisation runway still ahead.