Every satellite in low Earth orbit needs ground contact time. As constellations scale from dozens to hundreds of spacecraft, operators cannot afford to build and staff antennas at every latitude. Leaf Space, an Italian ground segment company founded in 2014 by Giovanni Pandolfi Bortoletto and Jonata Puglia, built the alternative: a software-defined ground station network that handles scheduling, data routing, and mission orchestration so operators do not have to.
Pandolfi studied aerospace engineering at Politecnico di Milano and serves as Chief Product Officer. He built Leaf Space’s proprietary technology stack: Leaf Line, which provides orchestrated mission and antenna management across the network, and Leaf Key, which offers access to dedicated antennas for operators requiring sovereign or exclusive capacity. The network has grown to 40-plus stations across 19 locations, supporting more than 170 satellites and over 22,000 passes per month, with more stations in the pipeline.
The expansion has accelerated. The network stretches from a teleport in Punta Arenas, Chile, at 53 degrees south latitude to an antenna added in Catalonia in March 2026, with distributor partnerships extending coverage into Asia-Pacific. The company is EBITDA positive, has posted double-digit revenue growth in recent years, and continues to add commercial constellation operators, government agencies, and defense programs to its customer base.
The growth is timed to a supply gap: every new LEO satellite needs ground contact windows, and the ground segment has not expanded at the same rate as orbital capacity.
At SmallSat Europe, where Leaf Space is a conference sponsor, Pandolfi joins the panel “The Hybrid Ground Segment: Orchestrating between Sovereign Networks and the Hyperscale Cloud,” alongside GH Partners Managing Partner Noel Rimalovski, COMSAT President and CEO Chris Faletra, ETL Systems Engineering Director Paul Gouws, RBC Signals President and CEO Ron Faith, and GomSpace CEO Carsten Drachmann. The session examines how software-defined ground stations and cloud virtualization allow operators to manage multi-orbit fleets without dedicated infrastructure at each site.
Forty-plus ground stations handling more than 22,000 passes a month is Pandolfi’s answer to an industry that spent years optimizing what goes up while underinvesting in what comes down.
