In the Wired Italia selection, published under a headline about ten Italian startups for 2025, Turin-based Aiko was joined by Caracol AM, Finapp, Subbyx, Volta, Translated and other companies. The magazine described ARCap as a standardised module for the autonomous rendezvous, inspection, docking or capture of spacecraft, including those not equipped for it. The editorial team reminded readers that the company's founder, Volodymyr Usov, is a former chairman of the Ukrainian Space Agency, which he headed in 2020.
The Kurs legacy
The company's product rests on a Soviet foundation. The Kurs rendezvous system was created in the USSR in the 1980s, and its developers worked in Kyiv, at the Kyiv Radio Plant. According to InVenture, more than 300 dockings of Soyuz and Progress spacecraft with the Mir station and the International Space Station were carried out using Kurs. After the annexation of Crimea in 2014, supplies of these systems to Russia ceased, and the team began looking for new products based on the same heritage.
Sources disagree on the exact date the company appeared. Some publications say it was founded in 2021, others in 2022. The Ukrainian venture is dated to 2021, while the Italian legal entity registered in Turin is linked to 2022. The Ukrainian patent application was filed on 4 January 2022, and the international PCT application appeared on 3 January 2023. Russia's invasion in February 2022 forced some investors to withdraw. The company's office was set up in Turin, while development stayed in Kyiv.
Turin, money and deadlines
The first public recognition was a win at the regional Start Cup Piemonte VdA competition on 8 November 2022. The company took first place, received 10,000 euros and the Jacobacci Silver prize. Start Cup Piemonte VdA is an annual competition for technology startups from Piedmont and the Aosta Valley, and its winners usually receive support to bring their products to market. In a November 2022 interview with AstroSpace, Usov said ARCap was 50–60 percent ready and that the mission was planned for 2024.
The company closed a serious financing round in March 2024. A 3.7 million euro seed round, about 4 million dollars, attracted the fund OTB Ventures, which acted as lead investor. The round included Credo, Galaxia (a fund of CDP Venture Capital and Obloo), PiemonteNext, the venture arm of CDP and Finpiemonte, as well as In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of a US non-profit organisation linked to the American intelligence community, and Inovo. The team then numbered 11 people. The ARCap flight was at that point scheduled for the end of 2025.
What came next
Recognition continued at the end of 2024. On 17 December the company was named startup of the year by ESA BIC Turin, the European Space Agency's business incubator in Turin, coordinated by Giuseppe Scellato. In the final days of December, Invitalia, Italy's national agency for attracting investment and developing business, approved a 1.1 million euro subsidised loan for Kurs Orbital under the Smart&Start programme, intended for young innovative companies.
In the Wired piece itself, the magazine reported that the company would soon raise a new interim, bridge round, a detail that did not appear in other publications about the startup. In February 2025 a patent application was published in the United States, with priority dating back to the Ukrainian application of 2022. On 28 March La Repubblica wrote about the company, and on 26 May a round table devoted to the region's space startups was held at a Politecnico di Torino conference.
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