The Luxembourg startup is taking a deliberately earth-first approach: proving radio-frequency wireless power transmission on the ground before scaling to orbit. Its CTO ran ESA’s Solaris SBSP initiative until the agency paused it in 2024. Daphni led the pre-seed round.
The person best placed to know why the European Space Agency decided not to press ahead with its space-based solar power programme is now building one privately. Dr Sanjay Vijendran was one of the main leaders of ESA’s Solaris initiative, a three-year R&D programme launched in 2022 to prepare Europe for space-based solar power.
When ESA concluded in August 2024 that the technology was not yet mature enough to advance to a demonstration mission, Vijendran left to co-found TerraSpark.
This week the Luxembourg startup announced it has raised over €5 million in a pre-seed round, backed by Paris-based VC Daphni alongside Sake Bosch, better ventures, Hans(wo)men Group, the Luxembourg Business Angel Network, and Karaoke Club.
TerraSpark’s founding thesis is that space-based solar power has historically been dismissed because it was imagined only at its final, enormous scale: gigawatt-class satellites in geostationary orbit, launched all at once.
The company’s approach is modular and phased. Before a single satellite is launched, TerraSpark is building commercial radio-frequency wireless power transmission systems for use on Earth, powering remote industrial sites, events, and other locations where running cables is impractical.
This generates revenue, de-risks the technology, and satisfies regulators, all while building towards the orbital version. In the company’s own framing, it is proving the system on the ground before asking anyone to trust it in space.
The three-phase roadmap is concrete. In 2026, the company plans to demonstrate wireless power transmission over controlled distances on Earth, validating alignment accuracy, energy density, and atmospheric tolerance.
In 2027 it will launch an orbital technology demonstrator and by 2028 aims to beam solar energy from a satellite prototype to a ground receiver, the first space-to-Earth power transmission milestone. Full commercial deployment, with a constellation capable of delivering continuous, weather-independent energy worldwide, is targeted for 2030 and beyond.
In the near term, the company has flagged a wireless power supply for a live event as its first pilot application.
TerraSpark was founded in 2025 by Jasper Deprez, a serial entrepreneur who previously built Tradler into a global HRTech platform, alongside Vijendran and Matthias Laug, who serves as COO. Deprez is CEO.
The venture is based in Luxembourg, which has become a notable European hub for space-economy startups partly because of the country’s favourable regulatory framework for commercial space activities. Vijendran’s background is in physics, he holds a PhD from Cambridge, and his years running ESA’s Solaris programme give him a detailed understanding of both the technical barriers and the regulatory path that space-based solar power faces.
TerraSpark’s European positioning and its deliberate start-on-Earth strategy distinguishes it from both: it is not betting on an orbital demonstration first, and it is building towards infrastructure rather than defence or data-centre applications. Whether that market exists at commercial scale before 2030 remains the central open question.
