EIC Accelerator Winner Involve Space and the Balloon Imaging Race

In January 2021 Alphabet wound down Loon, its fleet of internet balloons, and its chief executive Alastair Westgarth said the company had not found a way to get costs low enough for a sustainable business. In September 2024 Westgarth joined the board of Involve, a small Italian company from the Como area that flies reusable balloons at about 20 kilometres to photograph the ground. The bet is that persistent imaging from the stratosphere, sold to infrastructure operators, emergency services and defence, is a business where internet access from the stratosphere was not.

The EIC Accelerator selected the company at its October 2025 cut-off for blended finance. Involve Space announced the award as worth €12.5 million, and CORDIS records a grant of €2,487,117.50 for the project, which runs from 1 June 2026 to 30 November 2027. Five months into that period, the question is less whether the project has delivered than whether the company's own record supports the plan it was funded on.

Balloons that stay, instead of satellites that pass

The pitch rests on a gap between two established tools, which the company's website puts in three lines: "Satellites lack persistence. Drones lack endurance. Ground sensors lack coverage." Its platforms fly at about 20 kilometres and, per the CORDIS summary, are meant to deliver persistent monitoring that bridges the gap between satellites and drones. The website gives a ground resolution of 10 centimetres per pixel for its imaging, a figure the company publishes and which no independent test in the public record confirms.

The CORDIS summary describes four parts. Stratostats is the reusable, high-endurance platform with AI-driven navigation and modular payloads. Stratorelay is a lighter platform built to be deployed quickly. Neurostar is an AI system for predictive flight control and onboard data processing, and CLEAR is a cloud platform that turns imagery into answers, which the summary calls a "ChatGPT for Earth". The business model is data sold as a service plus custom missions, and the website also offers rides for customers' payloads.

Involve is not alone in the stratosphere. Near Space Labs, an American company, was already selling 10-centimetre imagery from wind-powered balloons in February 2022. The CORDIS summary presents Involve's offer as reusable platforms with AI navigation combined with onboard and cloud analytics, with an initial focus on the European market.

What the company has flown

The flight record is described differently by each source, and every figure comes from the company or from coverage of its announcements. At its seed round in September 2024 the company reported 30 successful commercial launches. The EU Space Programme Agency's success story of December 2025 gives more than 30 paid pilot missions and more than 100 engineering flights across three European test ranges. The company website now claims more than 200 flights, more than 15,000 kilometres flown and more than 40 payloads lifted.

One flight is documented by a third party. Houston Airports announced in February 2025 that Involve had completed its first US pilot launch at Ellington Airport the month before, together with the Federal Aviation Administration. CultureMap Houston reported that the five-hour mission reached about 85,000 feet and covered about 250 miles across Texas; EUSPA puts the altitude at 26 kilometres, which is consistent.

EUSPA also reports a Stratorelay demonstrator under the EU's CASSINI programme that mapped 1,500 square kilometres in 18 hours at 95% accuracy, and says it led to municipal contracts. Neither the municipalities nor the accuracy method is named. The website shows the logos of Enel, the Italian Space Agency, NASA, the Italian Ministry of Defence, ESA and MBDA, without saying what work was done for each. The one customer named in a news report is Rhodium Scientific, a Houston space biotech company that plans to fly experiments on Involve's balloons before its orbital missions, per CultureMap.

Three versions of the same funding

The sources agree that Earlybird led a seed round in September 2024 and disagree on its size. Tech.eu and Fortune Italia reported €2.5 million of seed equity plus €500,000 of convertible loans, €3 million in all. Forbes Italia wrote in January 2026 that the seed round was €2 million and that a €1 million loan from Smart&Start Italia, the Invitalia startup scheme, brought the total to €3 million. EUSPA's December 2025 article gives €1.3 million in total: €1 million from Earlybird, CDP Venture Capital and Innowwide, and €0.3 million from CASSINI and ESA's QC4EO programme. The figures cannot all be right, and the company has not published one that reconciles them.

The EIC award adds a further layer. Forbes Italia and the Lombardy region's innovation portal report €12.5 million in blended finance, a grant combined with equity, without a split. CORDIS records the grant at €2,487,117.50. The EIC's own announcement of 17 February 2026 lists 61 companies and €467 million of proposed funding but does not name Involve. No announcement of an EIC Fund investment in the company could be found on the company's website, in the EIC's news or in press coverage, so the equity part should be read as committed in the selection, not as invested.

The only financial accounts in public view come through a data aggregator. Companyreports.it lists the company as active, with 2024 revenue of €98,535, a 2024 loss of €461,667 and personnel costs of €74,531; it states that its data do not come directly from the Chamber of Commerce. A second source for these figures could not be found, and the filed accounts themselves were not consulted.

What the EIC project promised, and what can be checked

The project started on 1 June 2026 and CORDIS shows no report or deliverable yet, which is normal at this stage. The ESA Commercialisation Gateway says the EIC money will strengthen the CLEAR platform's AI and accelerate the LoonHive constellation. What can already be checked is activity around the project: the company opened its first US office at the Houston Spaceport, reported in October 2026 with first commercial missions from Houston planned by the end of 2026, and SatNews reported on 16 September 2026 that ESA's InCubed programme is co-funding StratoSAR, a balloon carrying synthetic aperture radar, with Echoes and Titan4 as partners and an undisclosed amount.

1. Reusable stratospheric platform flyingFlyingUS pilot flight in January 2025 documented by Houston Airports; paid pilots per EUSPA.
2. 10 cm imaging resolutionClaimPublished on the company website; no independent test found.
3. Multi-balloon constellationNot shownPlanned for 2026 per EUSPA; no public report of it flying.
4. CLEAR analytics platformOfferedMarketed on the website as data as a service; no named user or usage figure.
5. €83M revenue in five yearsProjectionAgainst €98,535 listed for 2024.

Why Brussels cares about the stratosphere

The Commission's Space Strategy for Security and Defence of March 2023 sets out to protect EU space systems and to make more use of space for security and defence. Involve positions its platforms for that market: Forbes Italia lists national and European security among the project's target uses, alongside critical infrastructure and disaster response, and the company's website shows the logos of the Italian Ministry of Defence and MBDA. The CORDIS summary sizes the downstream Earth observation market at $5 billion in 2024 and more than $8 billion by 2030. Involve also took support from the EU's CASSINI programme and from ESA BIC Lazio, where it was incubated from 2023 to 2025, before the EIC award, per EUSPA and ESA.

The company continues to build its public profile. It won the business federation CNA's Premio Cambiamenti 2026 in April 2026, chosen from more than a thousand startups, and the International Astronautical Congress 2026 programme lists a live stratospheric balloon launch organised by Involve for 6 October 2026.

The reporting is based on publicly available sources, listed below.