Today we’re announcing our investment in Galaxia Space Systems, a Halifax-built company making it possible for any organization to run a space mission, without ever owning a satellite. Amiral Ventures is proud to lead Galaxia’s seed round alongside Invest Nova Scotia.
Space just crossed its economic threshold
For most of its history, the space industry was defined by a single number: the cost of putting one kilogram into orbit. In the Space Shuttle era, that figure sat in the tens of thousands of dollars — high enough that only governments and telecom giants could afford to operate above the atmosphere. Reusable rockets broke that constraint. Over the past decade, the cost of reaching low Earth orbit has fallen by roughly 90%, to a few thousand dollars per kilogram, and next-generation launch vehicles are targeting another order-of-magnitude reduction.
When the price of a scarce input collapses, entire industries get rebuilt around abundance. That is what is happening above us right now. Research from the World Economic Forum and McKinsey projects that the global space economy will nearly triple, from $630 billion in 2023 to $1.8 trillion by 2035, roughly twice the pace of global GDP growth. Notably, most of that growth won’t come from rockets or exploration. It will come from satellite-enabled services: Earth observation, communications, positioning, and the orbital data layer that industries from agriculture to logistics to defence increasingly depend on.
But cheaper rockets only solved half the problem: getting things into orbit is now easy; getting intelligence back out of it is not.
The bottleneck has moved from the rocket to the data
Today’s satellites are, for the most part, cameras with radios. They collect a massive amount of raw data in orbit, but sometimes require several passes over a ground station to downlink everything, and only then does analysis begin. The result is an intelligence cycle measured in hours or days. This is unworkable for defence and security applications that need answers in seconds, and increasingly limiting for commercial users monitoring ships, pipelines, wildfires, and infrastructure in real time.
There is a second constraint hiding in plain sight: traditional satellites are frozen at launch. Their software cannot be meaningfully updated, their mission cannot adapt, and every new use case requires designing, building, and launching a new spacecraft. Imagine buying a server that could only ever run the application it shipped with. That is how most of the orbital layer works today.
The lesson of the last two decades of computing is that infrastructure wins when it becomes programmable. Space is next.
Why Galaxia matters
Galaxia is doing for space what the cloud did for computing: owning the physical infrastructure and providing the software environment that lets anyone build on top of it.
The company designs and manufactures roughly 80% of its satellites in-house in Halifax, including its onboard computers, power systems, and software-defined radio and wraps that hardware in MissionOne, a platform that delivers space access as a service. Clients can commission a full mission lifecycle, fly their hardware as a hosted payload on Galaxia’s buses, or, most importantly, use Virtual Satellite-as-a-Service (VSaS): deploying containerized AI applications to virtualized satellite instances already in orbit, and paying only for what they use.
Underneath VSaaS sits Mobius, Galaxia’s software-defined satellite platform. Mobius turns a satellite into a reprogrammable orbital compute node: applications can be deployed, updated, and retired in space the way they are in the cloud, and AI inference runs directly onboard, compressing the intelligence cycle from hours to seconds by analyzing data where it is captured, before it ever touches the ground.
None of this is theoretical. Galaxia has launched two satellites, is generating real revenue from the Canadian government (notably with the Department of National Defence), and will shortly launch four more spacecrafts. Furthermore, the commercial opportunity is what makes VSaaS compelling: any organization with an algorithm and a problem visible from orbit becomes a potential customer. An energy company could deploy a leak-detection model to a satellite already overhead and get pipeline alerts in near real time, no spacecraft to build, no mission to fund, just an application pushed to orbit the way software is pushed to the cloud today. Few seed-stage companies anywhere can point to two anchor government customers, hardware with flight heritage, and a commercial wedge that is scalable.
Sovereignty is structural
There is a second dimension to Galaxia’s position that we believe is under appreciated: it is one of the very few full-stack satellite platforms in the world that is entirely free of ITAR restrictions, the U.S. export-control rules that legally bar American providers from serving large portions of the global market.
That constraint matters more every year. Allied militaries, neutral nations, and commercial operators across Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa have genuine Earth-observation and intelligence requirements and are structurally cut off from most high-capability U.S. providers. NATO members are actively seeking sovereign or allied space capabilities. Canada itself faces a significant surveillance and communications gap across its Arctic and maritime approaches. For all of these buyers, an ITAR-free, Canadian-built platform is not a nice-to-have; it is often the only credible option. No amount of competitor capital can replicate that advantage.
The policy environment at home reinforces it. Canada’s 2025 budget committed $81.8 billion to defence over five years, anchored by a “Buy Canadian” industrial strategy, and BDC has launched a $4 billion platform dedicated to defence and national-security companies. A sovereign, dual-use space champion built in Atlantic Canada sits squarely in the path of that capital.
The team
Galaxia is led by founder and CEO Arad Gharagozli, who built and launched LORIS, Atlantic Canada’s first satellite, while founding the Dalhousie Space Systems Lab, and has spent a decade in mission-critical space computing. The core engineering team has been with him since that first launch, and the company has earned repeated institutional trust from both the CSA and DND. Through our diligence, the references were unusually consistent: the technical authorities who have worked most closely with Galaxia described a team that delivers ahead of schedule and beyond scope, and led by a founder who learns at a pace that stood out even to the people who trained him.
Space is an unforgiving domain, and hard-won operational experience, including the lessons of real in-orbit operations, is precisely what separates the high performing teams. Galaxia has that experience, and it shows in the discipline of its next-generation missions.
Why we invested
At Amiral Ventures, we back founders building the infrastructure of a more productive and more resilient economy. Few investments express that thesis as literally as this one. For a country like Canada, resilience increasingly means sovereign capability: the ability to see, sense, and decide using infrastructure it owns, in a world where access to allied systems can no longer be taken for granted. Galaxia is building that capability, and building it as a commercial platform rather than a cost centre.
We believe the orbital layer is at the same inflection point the internet reached when computing became a utility: launch is cheap, demand for real-time intelligence is compounding, and the winners will be the platforms that make space programmable. Galaxia combines the full hardware stack, the software environment, the government validation, and the structural market access to become that platform for Canada and the ITAR-constrained world.
As a Canadian fund focused on backing strategic technology companies built here, we are committed to supporting Galaxia with the network, follow-on capital, and enterprise and defence connectivity needed to compete at global scale.
Congratulations to Arad and the entire Galaxia team. We are excited to be on board as you bring the cloud to orbit.