Nebex is turning cross-border space spending into domestic revenue, giving French startups access to global government contracts while promising €1 of industrial return for every €1 spent abroad.
Cate Lawrence2 hours ago
Tejpaul Bhatia, CEO of space trading company Nebex, told me something that he admits will upset many, many, many space entrepreneurs, “with the exception of maybe Elon Musk.”
“The only thing that matters right now in space is business-model innovation. I would even go so far as to say there is no innovation in terms of deep tech when it comes to space.
And I won’t even claim this. Elon Musk said after the last Starship launch that there was no new invention. It was a brute-force improvement on a hundred-year-old equation. We had this technology in World War One. It’s the rocket equation.”
He admits that spacetech is certainly frontier tech, with definite innovation, iteration, and reusability.
“But nobody is inventing anything fundamentally new, and that’s okay.”
Founded in 2025 by Tejpaul Bhatia and Anand Subramanian, former executives at Axiom Space, a human spaceflight and space infrastructure company, and Manlio Di Stefano, former Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs of Italy, Nebex is a commercial exchange connecting space companies with sovereign buyers and capital.
And today, its launched a €100 million Industrial Return Initiative in France.
The initiative connects French space startups with global contract opportunities while creating a new model for France to achieve 100 per cent industrial return on cross-border space spending.
I sat down with Bhatia to learn how trading works in the space economy, why he believes it needs a new business model, and why Nebex is starting in France.
No country gets to space alone
While sovereignty is a ubiquitous theme in European tech, space is by definition, collaborative.
“It always has been. It always will be,” asserts Bhatia.
“No single country, no single company, no single individual is going to get humanity off the planet the way all eight billion of us deserve it to be.
Maybe you don’t have the launchers, but you have capabilities somebody else needs.”
Government space spending reached $138 billion in 2025
As demand for space capabilities expands globally, supply remains concentrated, with more than 85 per cent of available space supply in the US and Europe.
Nebex estimates this imbalance represents a $70 billion export gap annually.
“While space sovereignty is the political frame, we all know that no country reaches orbit alone. What has been missing from the space economy is a way to collaborate through competition and cooperation, without each transaction becoming a bilateral barter negotiation,” said Bhatia.
“Every government wants access to the best technology in the world while supporting its own industrial base.”
Until now, those goals have often been viewed as a tradeoff. Nebex was built to create a model where countries can access global capabilities while maintaining domestic economic value.
The problem with doing deals in space
Bhatia admits he’s been a space fanatic his whole life. He witnessed the challenges of space transactions while at Axion Space, explaining:
“Basically, when governments all over the world need to procure commercial supply — which is essentially every space transaction — it gets extremely complicated, especially when you have multiple countries involved. 12 of the astronauts we worked with went through sovereign deals.
These were professional, government astronauts from countries including the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Italy, Turkey, Sweden, Poland, Hungary, and India. Some went through the European Space Agency, and some didn’t.
So I got firsthand experience of how complex and complicated it is to have money flow for international collaborations.”
Bhatia uses Europe as an example of the friction Nebex is trying to remove.
“Say there’s a European country that needs to buy launch capabilities from a company in the US. In some cases, they can’t actually send the money across the Atlantic because of law or policy.
The European Space Agency is a perfect example.
“In other cases, it’s politics. It may not be a good time or send the right signal to be sending taxpayer money to the United States, where the perception can be more costly than the actual dollars going across.”
Yet governments still need access to capabilities that may not exist domestically.
“You’re seeing this everywhere. It’s true for launch, it’s true for telecoms. But the reality is that these capabilities are needed.”
That creates the question of industrial return: how can governments access technology abroad while ensuring public spending also generates economic value at home?
Space companies trying to sell to foreign governments face complex regulatory and compliance requirements.
“Take the US. We have very strict import and export regulations, including ITAR and EAR. If the United States government is your customer, you can’t simply go and sell that technology and IP to a foreign government. It’s not impossible. It’s just very costly.”
Bhatia says a cross-border contract can require companies to spend $1 million or more on lawyers, lobbyists, IT systems, and other compliance costs.
“When I was sending astronauts to space, some of those deals were $150 million deals. Of course we’re going to spend a million dollars to make sure we get that right. “But for another company with a $10 million deal, that’s a lot of money. That could be your whole margin.
The deal becomes more expensive than the actual revenue, even though there might be 15 of those deals available to you.”
Space is still very much a bilateral industry — government-to-government, G2B, B2B.
“But when you have bilateral trades, you don’t get the benefit of a multilateral perspective. Not everyone is going to need what somebody else has at the same time.”
Nebex’s model attempts to use that mismatch in geography and timing to its advantage.
“We can use policy to say, okay, money can’t cross the Atlantic, but that doesn’t mean money can’t stay in Europe and be spent with startups in Europe.
That has value — maybe not today, but definitely tomorrow — because we know other countries are buying those things and want to buy those things.
Why Nebex is starting in France
According to Bhatia, France, with its foundational role in the creation of ESA, and the institutions, infrastructure, and startup ecosystem built around that legacy, is the natural place to start. In terms of investor interest, France led Europe for space investment in the first half of 2026, with major deals including Eutelsat’s approximately €1 billion debt financing in February and UNIVITY’s €27 million raise in April.
Across Europe, space companies collectively raised €2.9 billion across 33 funding rounds.
“When we looked at supporting the startup sector, what France has done in leading that is amazing. If you look at ESA, it was always going to be Italy, Germany, or France — maybe the UK.
They’ve all done quite a bit, but France has made some significant statements recently, so France was where we wanted to start.”
For eligible cross-border spending conducted through Nebex, the company says it can generate an equivalent amount of commercial value for French space companies — effectively matching €1 of eligible foreign spending with €1 of industrial return in France.
The initiative can apply across existing and planned procurement, including human spaceflight, launch, satellites, hardware, software, data, and other space services.
Nebex can also recognise qualifying foreign space expenditure already made by France, potentially turning previous international spending into new commercial opportunities for French companies.
Turning €1 of foreign spending into €1 at home
When developing the model, Nebex deliberately imposed several constraints on itself. When developing the model, Nebex deliberately imposed several constraints on itself, beginning with its definition of a 100 per cent industrial return.
“When we say 100 per cent industrial return, or €1 for €1, it literally has to be 100 per cent,” says Bhatia.
“Not a promise to open an office. Not some political headline. Actual money being reinvested back into the sector through customer contracts and revenue.”
The company then added another constraint: the money generated through the mechanism could not leave the country, an approach Bhatia says was designed particularly with ESA geo-return policies in mind. Perhaps more importantly, Nebex wanted its model to work without requiring governments to rewrite procurement rules or institutions to change the way they operate.
“We cannot change any institutional behaviour. Not a single procurement law or policy will be modified.
Whenever a politician says, ‘I want this,’ and it goes down to the Treasury, procurement office, or agency, it shouldn’t be a question of whether this model will work or how they have to change their processes to make it work. Nothing changes. It’s the same as any other procurement a country would already do.”
That’s a pragmatic decision rather than an endorsement of existing procurement systems.
“That doesn’t mean procurement processes are good. It means that if we were trying to change them, we wouldn’t be able to solve this problem in 2026.”
The same principle applies to finance.
“We’re not going to change the way bankers work,” says Bhatia.
Those constraints ultimately led Nebex to its exchange model.
“By forcing those constraints, it allowed us to uncover the solution. That requires a neutral commercial exchange with demand and supply aggregated across the market.”
French startups need customers, not just capital
For French space companies, the other side of the model is access to that aggregated demand. Participating startups gain access to Nebex’s network of sovereign buyers, commercial opportunities, and capital.
The initiative is open to French space startups, with priority given to venture-backed companies, which can access the platform through private invite codes provided to their investors.
Other startups can join Nebex’s waitlist.
In France, Nebex is led by Etienne Cassuto, former venture innovation lead at Pernod Ricard, where he sent the first champagne bottle to the ISS with CNES and Axiom Space.
Regarding the response to the initiative, Bhatia said feedback has been positive across political, financial, and space-industry circles.
“The political feedback has been great. The space feedback has been great. The financial feedback has been great. It’s very difficult for anyone to say no to this offer. It’s a win-win.”
Putting investors to work
For Bhatia, however, simply injecting more capital into the space sector is not the answer.
“The reality is that money is not the problem. But money is also sometimes not the solution.”
He argues there is already more than enough money in global trade settlement “for us to build every single thing every country wants in space right now.”
Still, the challenge is enabling that capital to move effectively.
“We can’t simply keep saying space is hard and expensive because that keeps the industry dwarfed. We have the trust; now it’s creating liquidity.”
Nebex aims to do this by matching government demand with suppliers across its network, applying the model to new and existing contracts and to both established prime contractors and startup
s. Bhatia admits he tends to “over-index on startups” when discussing Nebex, reflecting the backgrounds of its founders as repeat entrepreneurs.
“I created a company to support space founders. But in doing that, we’ve created a capital-market solution for the whole industry and for governments.”
has taken a deliberately gradual approach to the rollout. It initially opened the platform to its investors’ portfolio companies, making Nebex’s investor network particularly relevant.
The company raised a $30 million seed round, which it asserts is the largest seed round in space fintech history. GV led the round, with participation from Eniac Ventures, 2048 Ventures, Better Tomorrow Ventures, Oceans Ventures, AIN Ventures, Also Capital, Anagram, Armory Square Ventures, Multiball Capital, Trajectory Capital, and VSC Ventures.
Investors effectively become an initial route into the supply side of its marketplace: investors can introduce portfolio companies to revenue opportunities that Nebex identifies across sovereign space programmes. This puts some pressure back on investors:
“If there’s a few hundred million dollars for this one startup this year that is sitting under a rock and I can tell you which rock to turn over, why aren’t you going after it?” asserts Bhatia.
“On average, companies are finding $100 million worth of revenue opportunities globally that they weren’t even aware of. Our platform uses tools to match and cover all of this, but we’re not talking about a giant universe.
You’re talking about a hundred or so countries and a few thousand suppliers. It’s not necessarily that an exchange brings together people who wouldn’t know each other or that the business wouldn’t exist.
It’s that the friction is so high that unless you have this bird’s-eye view, it’s hard to justify doing it.”
Nebex is also in conversations with financial institutions in France to develop financial products and services specifically dedicated to the French space supply chain.
Beyond launch: where France could win
In terms of what kind of spacetech can expect the most traction through the initiative, Bhatia predicts that while a lot of attention is focused on launch tech — “It makes sense because without launch, we can’t get to space —” it accounts for only a small percentage of global government space spending.
He predicts that satellites, constellations, and Earth observation will be very large, and offer an opportunity for France to play a very significant role. Then there’s hardware, infrastructure, software, integration — all the tooling that goes into creating payloads — and the equipment on the payloads: sensors, cameras, telecoms, radios, etc.
Then, within lunar orbit, there’s everything from launchers and landers to cislunar communications and deep-space communications. It’s almost an evolution of what we see in low Earth orbit.
“That’s going to be significant because of Artemis, NASA, ESA, and countries such as the UAE that care a lot about it. Then the next level out would be deep space. It really spans all capabilities.”
Taking the model across Europe
Nebex plans to replicate the initiative across Europe, admitting:
“My intention with this company is to create superpowers for founders.
So it’s a little bit of pressure on investors to make sure they’re giving their startups all the resources they can, allowing those founders to focus on building the future we all deserve.”
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