The company hopes to go public in Europe in the future, CEO and co-founder Rafał Modrzewski told Bloomberg. Finnish space intelligence start-up Iceye is the first company to have received backing from the €5bn EU scale-up fund aiming to direct growth capital to high-potential companies within the bloc. The EQT-backed Scaleup Europe Fund co-led Iceye’s €1bn June raise, the Fund’s co-head and EQT partner Victor Englesson told Bloomberg – which reported that the Fund contributed €300m to the financing. My co-founder Pekka Laurila and I met as students on an Erasmus exchange, received our first funding through Horizon 2020, and we are grateful for the European Commission’s role in initiating the Scaleup Europe Fund. The European Commission first announced the Scaleup Europe Fund back in October 2025, with the intention of building on the ‘choose Europe to start and scale’ strategy launched earlier that year.