French Space situational awareness startup Share My Space has closed a €10 million Series A funding round. With the 23 January announcement, the company also revealed that it would be renamed Aldoria.
The company’s Series A funding round was led by Starquest Capital and included participation from Bpifrance, Expansion Ventures, Space Founders France, and Wind Capital. According to the company, the round was oversubscribed.
Aldoria currently supports over 20 customers with a network of six optical surveillance stations on four continents. With the funding secured as part of its Series A, the company plans to expand its network to 12 stations by 2025. It will also begin the development of a multi-sensor approach, which will allow Aldoria to address more customer use cases.
What’s in a name? In this instance, it’s difficult to say. The company claims that Aldoria is “a former name of the Pleiades nebula.” Also known as Seven Sisters, the cluster contains over a thousand stars, the brightest of which are visible to the naked eye. The name Aldoria is certainly not commonly associated with the Seven Sisters. In fact, we could find only one reference to the connection on the Pleiades Wikipedia entry, which cites a manuscript featuring text from the astronomer Alchandreus, a man that The Getty Center’s museum records describe as “a somewhat mysterious figure who was active sometime before the 900s.” According to the entry, Aldoria and Aldraia are Latin transcriptions of the Arabic name for Pleiades. Regardless of origins, it is an unusual choice, seeming more at home as a destination in a D&D campaign than on the letterhead of a space company.
