Gama raises €15M to mass-produce solar arrays for power-hungry satellites

Gama, the French company building ultra-light deployable solar arrays for satellites, has raised a €15M seed round from Transition, Planet A, Draper Associates, and Manta Ray.

The capital takes Wing, its deployable array, from development into volume production at the company’s site in Ivry-sur-Seine, just outside Paris.

The bet is that electricity is becoming orbit’s scarcest resource. Direct-to-device networks, broadband constellations, and orbital data centres all need far more power per satellite than earlier generations; every watt of it comes from solar array surface area, and all of that area has to fold into a rocket fairing.

“For years the hard part of space was getting there,” said CEO and co-founder Andrew Nutter; launch got cheap, and the constraint moved to power.

Supply has not kept up. Most satellite makers rely on specialised III-V solar cells, produced in small volumes by a handful of suppliers with lead times of a year or more.

Gama instead takes high-volume terrestrial silicon cells, the kind made by the billion for rooftops, and adapts them for space, targeting six-month lead times once its line is running and what it claims will be industry-leading cost per watt.

Wing itself is pitched as a complete power system rather than a panel: solar generation, sun-tracking rotation, power management, and optional energy storage in one unit, plus the control algorithms that keep a satellite stable with a very large array attached. Because Gama builds both the hardware and that software, it says the architecture scales as satellites keep growing.

The customer pull is already signed. In September, Gama partnered with Eclipse Space, a constellation-platform builder founded by former SpaceX Starlink engineers, to supply arrays as the power layer for its satellites, with a first demonstration unit due in summer 2027.

The SpaceX DNA runs on both sides of that deal. Gama’s engineering is led by co-founder and CTO Daniel Chapman and VP of engineering Duncan Adams, who built Starlink hardware and production lines.

“Building one great piece of hardware is not the hard part. Building thousands is,” Chapman said.

The round funds the production line, expanded testing, and around 60 engineering hires, tripling the 30-person team.

Gama has reinvented itself to get here. It began life as a solar-sail venture, flying its Gama Alpha demonstrator in 2023 with the support of French space agency CNES; the deployable-structures expertise carried over, the propulsion dream did not.

The round lands in a busy season for European space hardware, from PAVE Space’s record seed for orbital tugs to the component suppliers quietly arming the continent’s constellation push.

Gama’s wager is narrower and bolder: that whoever industrialises power in orbit becomes the supplier everyone else’s roadmap depends on.