In January 2026, France’s space agency CNES awarded a €50 million contract to a consortium led by Loft Orbital to build DESIR, the country’s first sovereign synthetic aperture radar satellite demonstrator. The deal made Loft the prime contractor on a French defense reconnaissance asset, a role traditionally reserved for Airbus or Thales, not a San Francisco startup founded in 2017.
Alexander Greenberg co-founded Loft Orbital with CEO Pierre-Damien Vaujour after working in business development at Spire Global and as an aerospace management consultant at Avascent. The company they built operates on a premise that inverts the traditional satellite business model: instead of selling hardware, Loft sells computing capacity in orbit. Customers deploy software applications onto Loft-operated satellites the way a developer deploys code to a cloud server, without building, launching, or operating their own spacecraft.
The model has attracted capital at scale. Loft closed a $170 million Series C in January 2025, bringing total funding past $326 million. The investment thesis rests on a bet that the satellite industry’s value will migrate from hardware to software, and that the companies controlling the orbital compute layer will capture the margin.
That thesis has been finding customers. On February 2, 2026, Loft launched a dedicated AI for Space business unit, building on a partnership with German defense AI firm Helsing to deploy a multi-sensor satellite constellation for real-time intelligence processing. On February 18, 2026, Loft signed a deal with Australia’s SmartSat CRC to deploy an edge-AI wildfire detection application onto existing on-orbit infrastructure. In December 2024, the company partnered with Esper to fly next-generation hyperspectral sensors on Loft satellites. The company plans to launch a 10-satellite constellation in the second half of 2026.
The common thread across these deals is that the satellite is not the product. The data processing that happens on orbit before anything reaches the ground is what customers are paying for. That distinction matters because the economics of downlinking raw data from LEO are becoming untenable as constellation sizes grow and ground station bandwidth fails to keep pace.
At SmallSat Europe, Greenberg is a standalone speaker on the program. His presence intersects most directly with the panel “The Latency Arbitrage: Calculating the ROI of In-orbit Computing vs. Direct-to-Ground,” where And One Technologies President Eric Anderson, Unibap Space Solutions CEO Johan Åman, SITAEL Managing Director Marco Molina, Elve VP of Business Development Ryan Conroy, and D-Orbit UK Head of Space Cloud Viney Dhiri examine whether the business case for edge computing in orbit holds up against traditional downlink strategies. Loft’s CNES contract and Helsing partnership suggest Greenberg already has his answer.
The satellite industry spent decades treating orbit as a place to put sensors. Loft Orbital is treating it as a place to put servers. The €50 million question is whether governments and commercial operators will rent compute time in space the way they rent it on Earth.
