Why we invested in Resoloon
Resoloon raised €550k from Project Europe and Day One Capital
Look up. The space directly above our heads is choked with traffic. Low Earth Orbit is bustling with satellite constellations powering global internet and real-time comms. Closer to the ground, the skies are buzzing with a growing swarm of commercial and military drones. The troposphere is a constant highway for jetliners, while military aircraft push the upper limits near 20km.
But between the orbiting metal and the buzzing drones, there is a massive, silent void.
The middle and upper stratosphere “near space” is virtually empty. Right now, it’s the domain of transient weather balloons and fleeting surveillance. We see it differently. We see an untapped frontier waiting to be utilized.
Today anyone trying to observe the Earth is trapped in an “impossible tetrilemma.” You are forced to choose between resolution (detail), coverage (area), continuity (persistence), and cost. You can’t have it all.
Satellites see the whole chessboard but miss the individual pieces.
Drones see the pieces in extreme detail but miss the board.
Planes offer great views, right up until they have to refuel or you see the operational costs.
We invested in Resoloon who plans to solve the tetrilemma. They have developed a high-altitude balloon imaging system that fundamentally reimagines Earth observation by combining near drone-level resolution with satellite-like coverage at radically lower cost. The platform consists of autonomous stratospheric balloons carrying lightweight sensor payloads not heavier than 4kg total.
It’s not enough to send a balloon up. You need to control it. The team developed their own AI system to predict the winds across 15 atmospheric layers with 95% accuracy enabling precise navigation. Resoloon also has their own control interface and a customer facing interface to make ordering a balloon as easy as ordering an Uber.
They got this far with €10k investment. Now, with Project Europe we invested a total of €550k to the company to finalise their product and narrow down the use cases ranging from critical infrastructure monitoring, disaster response and national security.
The company is just a few months old, but its 20-year-old founder, Domokos, has already been developing the technology for over two years. He represents a powerful shift where the “impossible” has become accessible. Today’s talent doesn’t need a legacy laboratory to innovate, they have AI-enhanced coding and instant prototyping at their fingertips.
This technological leap has turned age into a competitive advantage, allowing a new breed of “student-experts” to outpace traditional industries through sheer speed and modern tooling. It is a trend we are seeing across the board, and we are here to support it.
We can’t wait to see what Domokos and his team are capable of as they lead this new wave of entrepreneurship.
Really smart framing with the tetrilemma concept. The stratosphere gap feels obvious in hindsight but nobody's been exploiting it systematically. What caught my atention is the AI wind prediction part, 95% accuracy across 15 layers is wild considering how chaotic atmospheric dynamics can be. Curious how they handle edge cases when the model gets it wrong tho.