Greece became the first country to deploy a dedicated national wildfire early warning system built on commercial satellite data when it signed a €20 million contract with OroraTech in 2025. The Canadian Space Agency followed with a Can$72 million contract to Spire Global and OroraTech for the WildFireSat mission, a sovereign monitoring capability scheduled to launch in 2029. Two government customers, two continents, one thesis: that thermal infrared imaging from low Earth orbit can detect fires before they become catastrophes.
Martin Langer co-founded OroraTech in Munich after studying aerospace engineering at the Technical University of Munich. The company he built is vertically integrated in a way most Earth observation startups are not: OroraTech designs its own thermal sensors, manufactures and operates its own satellites, and delivers the processed intelligence through its Wildfire Solution platform. That stack included 14 spacecraft in orbit as of March 2025, after a dedicated Rocket Lab Electron launch dubbed “Finding Hot Wildfires Near You” deployed eight satellites in a single mission.
The resolution tells the story: OroraTech can detect fires as small as four meters by four meters, and the constellation monitors more than 407 million hectares daily, an area roughly the size of the European Union. The data feeds not only wildfire detection but predictive fire modeling, burnt area mapping, and fire spread analysis, capabilities that move the value proposition from alerting to planning.
The business has scaled accordingly. OroraTech opened U.S. headquarters in Denver in April 2025, with Co-Founder Thomas Gruebler leading the American operation and Larimer County, Colorado signing on as the first U.S. customer. The company extended its Series B to €37 million in May 2025 with backing from BNP Paribas Solar Impulse Venture Fund and Rabo Ventures. By January 2026, Handelsblatt and Tech Tour named OroraTech among Germany’s unicorn-potential companies. At CES 2025, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang featured OroraTech’s satellite AI in his keynote, a signal that the company’s on-orbit processing capability has caught the attention of the broader computing industry.
At SmallSat Europe, Langer is a standalone speaker on the program. His presence intersects most directly with the panel “The Multi-Physics EO Stack: Fusing SAR, Thermal, and Hyperspectral,” where Privateer Space CSO James Crawford, Cambridge Consultants’ Stewart Marsh, SITAEL Managing Director Dr. Marco Molina, Vantor SVP Matthew Jenkins, Simera Sense CCO Thys Cronje, and Kayhan Space CTO Araz Feyzi examine how fusing multiple sensor modalities creates intelligence that no single instrument can deliver alone. Thermal is one leg of that stack, and Langer operates the constellation that provides it.
The wildfire market is no longer speculative. Governments are writing checks, insurers are pricing risk, and the 2025 fire seasons in southern Europe, California, and western Canada have made satellite-based detection a procurement priority rather than a research interest. Langer built the constellation while the market was still forming. The question heading into SmallSat Europe is whether 14 satellites are enough, or whether the demand curve will outrun the orbital capacity.
