Table of Contents
Two Australian hard-tech companies raised a combined A$38 million in 10 days. Sydney-based MP Space closed an A$23 million seed round for its spacecraft batteries, while Hadean Energy secured an A$15 million grant from the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) for a pilot hydrogen plant in Victoria.
The deals are different, but they tell the same story. Technology that spent years in the lab is now being tested with customers and on the factory floor. The money is coming from two places at once, venture capital funds and government.
Batteries already in orbit
MP Space announced the round on 26 October 2026. It’s worth about US$16.1 million, which is no small sum for a seed round in the space sector. Blackbird led the round, joined by Systemiq Capital, Speedinvest, MFV Partners and UK-based Seraphim Space, which had never before invested in an Australian company.
Jay Manley and Sam Paterson, both former Tesla engineers, founded MP Space in January 2024. The company makes software-defined batteries. The founders plan to move next into integrated power systems for spacecraft, covering not just a standalone battery but a satellite’s entire power supply.
In October, the batteries made their first trip to orbit on SpaceX’s Bandwagon-5 mission (a rideshare series that puts spacecraft from many customers on a single rocket). Customers have already picked MP Space as their supplier on orders and projects covering more than 500 spacecraft. For a company that isn’t yet three years old, that’s arguably a lot.
So where’s the money going? Mostly into manufacturing in Sydney and hiring engineers. The company expects to produce up to 5,000 space components a year by the end of 2027. In hard tech, that kind of outlay is normal, but a purely digital business has almost none of it. An online gaming operator updates its pokies straight on the website. Wild Tokyo Casino rolls out new games and card tables without a warehouse or an assembly line, whereas MP Space’s battery needed almost three years to get from the company’s founding to its first flight.
Hydrogen for steelmakers
The second announcement came on 5 November. ARENA has committed A$15 million to Hadean Energy’s A$30 million pilot plant, so the government is covering exactly half the budget.
The plant is based on technology that CSIRO, the national science agency, spent eight years developing. Hadean estimates it uses about 30% less electricity than conventional electrolysers. That figure comes from the company, and there’s been no independent testing yet. But if it holds up, hydrogen will get noticeably cheaper, since electricity is usually the biggest part of its production cost.
The pilot is designed to produce up to 7 kg of hydrogen an hour. That sounds modest, but it should cover about 85% of the hydrogen demand for annealing in steelmaking, where hydrogen provides a protective atmosphere while the metal is heat-treated. Steelmaking is one of the most carbon-intensive industries, which makes steelmakers an entirely logical customer for a pilot like this.
The point of the project is to take the technology off the lab bench and into a real plant, where it will face real loads and breakdowns. There’s no launch date yet. Everything hinges on finalising arrangements for the site and securing approvals.
Who pays for the risk
The two deals show who pays for what in hard tech. MP Space needs a factory, engineers and test flights. Hadean can’t start without a site and paperwork, even with half its budget coming from the government. A venture fund is prepared to wait for production to ramp up to capacity, but it wants to see orders, and MP Space has them. The government agency takes on the stage private capital tends to avoid, the first industrial pilot, where the technology may well fail.
What’s next
The milestones are fairly clear. MP Space has to reach its stated production capacity, and customers with orders covering more than 500 spacecraft will be waiting for deliveries. Hadean first needs to sort out its site and get approvals. Only then will the pilot produce its first hydrogen.
For Seraphim Space, the MP Space deal is its first move into the Australian market. If the Sydney company delivers on its production plan, the UK fund will likely have reason to take a closer look at local space startups.