Laser communications company Archangel Lightworks has secured new funding to fuel its optical terminal technology.

The company this week announced the closure of an oversubscribed £10 million ($14m) Series A round led by Santander Alternative Investments.

The company specializes in deployable gigabit laser-link capability products, including the TERRA-M terminal, a miniature optical terminal, described as high-volume, secure, and dual-use. Historically, defense and mission-critical industries have had a propensity for deployable terminals, more so than civilian applications. The company has seen a total of $17.5m in investment to date.

“The demand for space-based information and connectivity continues to grow exponentially,” Richard Johanson, CEO of Archangel Lightworks, said in a statement. “The Archangel Lightworks team has done incredible work designing, building, and deploying our laser communications systems, and now is the time for us to accelerate with our partners, new and old, to meet the needs that we are hearing from our customers across markets.”

Archangel Lightworks intends to deploy this new capital on scaling manufacturing capabilities in its home county of Oxfordshire.

The company says its tech overcomes the shortcomings of radio-based data infrastructure, which it claims can be intercepted, spied on, and jammed, has limitations in throughput, and suffers from radio spectrum congestion. Optical is faster and more secure, but carries its own limitations. Nonetheless, optical ground technology is becoming associated with the orbital data center trend.

A recent Gartner report, entitled Orbital Datacenters Won’t Serve Terrestrial Needs, so Focus on Earth, VP analyst Bill Ray warned that data could not be reliably downstreamed from orbit via laser because of Earth’s cloud cover, which doesn’t stop radio waves, but cannot be pierced by optical transmission. Prior to orbital data centers, optical technologies were more often touted as redundancy for the more universal radio technology in the face of electronic warfare.

In 2024, Archangel claimed its TERRA-M terminal could be deployed within 30 minutes, which only requires calibration in one clear-sky interval, without the need to recalibrate for night, or vice versa.

“This is a clear validation of the world-leading capabilities being developed by the Archangel Lightworks team and an indication of the step-change in ease of deployment and commissioning that we will be able to offer with our TERRA-M product,” explained Owain Pryce-Jones, chief technology officer at Archangel Lightworks at the time.

The round also featured participation from the National Security Strategic Investment Fund (NSSIF), Blackfinch Ventures, Oxford Capital, Lycka Limited, and Oxford Science Enterprises (OSE).

“We are delighted to partner with the Archangel team and our fellow investors in this exciting and strategically important initiative relating to ground space communication infrastructure,” Nadir Maruf, head of infrastructure and venture capital at Santander Alternative Investments. “The progress the company was able to achieve thus far was remarkable, and we look forward to working with the company in the years ahead.”