Gama, a French aerospace startup, has raised €15 million in seed funding led by Transition and Planet A, with participation from Draper Associates and Manta Ray. The round, announced November 12, 2026, will fund the company's first production line for its Wing deployable solar array, built for satellites rather than rooftops, according to Tech Funding News.
The company has not disclosed a valuation. The new money follows an earlier €2 million round backed by French public investment bank BPI, the French space agency CNES, and angel investors.
What does Gama actually make?
Gama started out working on solar sails, thin, light panels meant to propel small spacecraft using sunlight pressure instead of fuel. It has since pivoted toward a more immediately commercial product: deployable solar arrays that unfold once a satellite reaches orbit, generating power for onboard systems.
The twist is in the materials. Gama's arrays use high-volume silicon solar cells, the same kind mass-produced for rooftop installations, rather than the exotic, expensive cells typically flown in space. That should make the panels cheaper to build at scale while keeping them light enough that launching them costs less, since every kilogram of mass on a rocket carries a price tag. The company has already flown a demonstration mission, Gama Alpha, in 2023, and lists Eclipse Space as a customer, announced in September 2026.
Why does lighter power matter for satellites right now?
Satellite operators are launching more spacecraft, more often, and competing on cost per watt of power generated in orbit as much as on sensor quality or bandwidth. As Planet A co-founder Nick de la Forge put it, energy in orbit is becoming critical infrastructure, and lighter arrays translate directly into less launch mass and lower cost per mission.
That positions Gama against established players like Airbus-backed solar array suppliers and newer entrants chasing the small-satellite boom, where cheaper, lighter components can be the difference between a constellation pencilling out financially or not. Gama's advantage, if it holds, is using commodity solar cells instead of custom space-grade ones, a bet on manufacturing scale rather than exotic materials science.
What's the plan for the money, and what comes next?
Gama plans to build its first Wing production line at a facility in Ivry-sur-Seine, near Paris, and expand in-house testing capabilities to qualify the arrays for flight. The company currently employs around 30 people and intends to hire roughly 60 more, nearly tripling headcount, to get the production line running.
The first demo unit built on the new line is slated for summer 2027. That timeline gives Gama a little under a year to prove its manufacturing approach works at the volumes needed to make commodity solar cells a viable substitute for space-grade ones, the central question investors are betting on with this seed round.