VCs are getting serious about space-related startups, and there are some truly exponential growth opportunities in the SpaceTech ecosystem. But the majority of money that went into SpaceTech last year was in just two deals -- a 1 billion fundraise for SpaceX and a 500 million raise for OneWeb. If you ignore those as outliers, SpaceTech funding in 2015 was only around 300 million. The segment of startups seeing the most VC attention is the earth observation (EO) segment. Companies building earth observation (EO) satellite constellations (basically, cameras put into orbit and photographing the Earth on a regular basis) pulled in more than half the SpaceTech funding from 2012 to 2015 and 72% in 2015.

SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwired - Apr 11, 2016) - Grishin Robotics announces new 100 million fund, four times the size of its initial 25 million fund, announced in mid-2012. Originally one of the first exclusively robotics funds in the world, the firm now expands its investment focus to companies involved in the "Hardware Revolution" and becomes one of the ecosystem's largest players. While Dmitry self-financed Grishin Robotics' investments until now, a number of institutional and individual investors from Europe and the U.S. became partners in this new fund. Until recently, people mainly thought about robots as multi-functional products in humanoid form-factor. Today single-purpose devices, combining sensors with software and data analytics components, have the potential to radically automate the physical world around us -- eliminating "dirty, dull & dangerous" tasks from our lives and, thus, realizing the ultimate purpose of robotics.