Aldoria is a French scale-up that offers comprehensive Space Situational Awareness (SSA) services and protects critical assets in space. Its solution enables precise tracking and identification of space objects, offering insights into their position, mission, and future trajectory predictions. 

In October 2024, Aldoria was selected as one of the 72 new companies to join the EIC Scaling Club and became a New Space Group member. 

What exactly is Aldoria’s mission? Who are the people behind this scale-up, and what are the future goals of the company? To learn that and more, we spoke to Aldoria’s CEO and co-founder, Romain Lucken. 

The Aldoria advantage

Established in 2017, Aldoria is a notable player in the SSA market. The company’s technologies allow continuous monitoring of space, data collection, and processing. This enables the protection of spacecraft and satellites, including rockets satellites, and understanding of the space situation regarding satellite behaviors and threat risk for both governments and commercial players.

Asked about Aldoria’s secret to success, Romain tells us that behind these novel services stand two pillars – a unique optical technology and data processing pipelines. The CEO explains:

“Aldoria has developed a unique technology to monitor low-Earth orbit using optical telescopes, which is a smart way to scan the sky and detect all the objects across the sky from a given location.” 

The scale-up has also designed multi-telescope observation stations (MTOS) that use the monitoring technology, and currently, there are three operational MTOS. In addition, Aldoria has three single telescope observation stations that complement the primary observatory network. “This knowledge of the optical technology and this proprietary design that we’ve developed is key to our success,” says Romain.

The other aspect – data processing pipelines – that Aldoria has developed over the years enables the scale-up to control the observation stations and efficiently process the data at every stage. “From image processing to maneuver recommendations and threat analysis, all is automatized and secured.”

Responding to a critical issue

Romain tells us that the idea behind Aldoria came slowly, but the ultimate starting point was the issue of space debris: “In 2016 when we had the original idea, space debris was already a big problem. Hence, space services were becoming increasingly critical for our life on Earth.” In response to this growing concern, Aldoria’s co-founders – Romain and Damien Giolito – decided to tackle the issue. Romain explains: 

“We didn't know how we would do it exactly or how to monetize it. Nevertheless, we got started. It took us two years to identify our positioning – the combination of optical technology and data processing – and then, in 2020, we got our first commercial contracts. We hired the first employees, and it got started.”

Since 2020, Aldoria’s team has grown notably, and has 48 employees now. The team takes pride in its strong expertise and diverse skill set. Romain says the company has hired top experts from the space industry and outside it – the defense sector, for example. He adds that the scale-up is run by a strong leadership team: “All of them are talented people committed to the company's success. And part of scaling the company is integrating people and relying on them to reach success and continue the company's growth, rather than managing every single person and activity yourself as a founder.” 

When it comes to co-founders, both Romain and Damien are engineers, and Romain is a physicist as well. Aldoria was created when he was still doing his PhD, and after completing it, Romain went into the company full-time. Damien has a civil engineering background and vast experience in project management for Earth observation from aircraft. 

Growth in a nascent industry

When asked about Aldoria’s biggest challenges, Romain is straightforward – it’s the chosen field. “We started a business in an area where nobody was making money, and the market was just emerging. Seven years later, it’s still emerging.” 

However, the scale-up has managed to grow and succeed. As the CEO explains, this is largely due to educating customers – including public institutions – about the urgent need for space security and how it can be managed differently with some regulations added. 

“All this takes a lot of time and effort, and it's one of our challenges – to help the market grow.”

Romain adds that deploying infrastructure and building hardware can be scary: “You have to invest a lot of time and resources to make the hardware operational. But once it works, it feels great.” When asked about the scale-up’s most significant milestones, the CEO names two: detecting and retrieving the trajectory of the smallest satellite in low-Earth orbit in 2022 and significantly increasing the number of identified objects in 2024. 

“During the third quarter of 2024, we were able to detect and identify 21,000 different space objects. This shows how much we've improved our operations. [...] We’ve also been able to detect hundreds of objects more that we're just not able to identify and catalog because they're unknown.”

Aldoria sees a growing market demand enhanced by governmental support and raised awareness from satellite operators. The scale-up aims to expand its network and ensure industry leadership by offering the best orbital coverage and sensitivity. “We're also working very hard on our information system to ensure the full traceability of the data. And this is unique in the world – nobody offers this level of traceability and transparency to users, and we believe this is an important differentiator,” says Romain. 

Building on EIC partnership

As for participating in the EIC Scaling Club, Aldoria’s CEO is grateful for being selected to join the initiative. The scale-up has been connected to EIC since early 2021, having participated in the EIC accelerator and receiving an equity investment in 2023. “I’m thrilled to continue this collaboration with EIC as we enter the next stage of our growth,” says Romain, and adds that the company will be looking to raise a Series B round in 2025. 

He also mentions that by joining the EIC Scaling Club, Aldoria has access to high-quality mentors: “We've met some of them already, and we're looking forward to starting work with them. We also want to integrate the mentors into Aldoria’s team as advisors, councils, and coaches to ensure that our Series B fundraising is a success.”

About the EIC Scaling Club

The EIC Scaling Club is a curated community where 120+ European deep tech scale-ups with the potential to build world-class businesses and solve major global challenges come together with investors, corporate innovators and other industry stakeholders to spur growth.

The top 120+ European deep tech companies will be carefully selected from a pool of high-growth scale-ups that have benefitted from EIC financial schemes, other European and national innovation programmes, and beyond.

The EIC Scaling Club is an EIC-funded initiative run in partnership by Tech Tour, Bpifrance (EuroQuity), Hello Tomorrow, Tech.eu (Webrazzi), EurA and IESE Business School.

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