Pangea Aerospace

Founded in 2018 and based in Barcelona and Toulouse, Pangea Aerospace (trading as Pangea Propulsion) is a European company exclusively dedicated to space propulsion, following a business model comparable to Rolls-Royce in aviation: it designs, tests and manufactures rocket engines and propulsion subsystems for launch vehicle and in-space customers rather than building its own launcher. The company pivoted from full launcher development to engine specialization in 2022, building on the insight gained from its earlier work.

Pangea made history as the first company in the world to successfully ignite a methane/liquid-oxygen (methalox) aerospike engine, proving in practice a nozzle concept that had remained largely theoretical for decades because of its thermal, structural and manufacturing complexity. Aerospike nozzles maintain near-optimal expansion efficiency across all altitudes, unlike conventional bell nozzles, promising higher performance and greater mission versatility. This heritage underpins ARCOS, Pangea's modular aerospike engine platform, and extends into KRONOS, a full-flow staged-combustion engine in development that is intended to become Europe's first engine of that cycle and among the most powerful ever conceived on the continent, aimed at heavy and super-heavy reusable launch vehicles. The company's third product line, the Nereus family, covers modular monopropellant and bipropellant in-space thrusters (1 N to 1.5 kN) using green, storable H2O2/Jet A propellants for satellites, orbital transfer vehicles and landers.

Pangea's technology base spans advanced high-temperature materials and alloys, additive manufacturing (including laser powder bed fusion for regeneratively-cooled combustion chambers), innovative cooling systems, sustainable propellant chemistry, and AI-assisted design/simulation tools to shorten development cycles. The company has been selected by the European Space Agency to define a Very High Thrust rocket engine (KRONOS) for future European reusable launchers, and by CNES (France) for the ASTRE project's high-thrust engine preliminary design. In January 2026 the European Commission named Pangea Propulsion a winner of its Prize for Game-Changing Innovation for European Launchers (EUR 950,000) for the ARCOS aerospike architecture, alongside ArianeGroup, Sener and other European propulsion innovators.

In March 2025 Pangea closed a EUR 23 million Series A round led by Hyperion Fund, with participation from Primo Capital's Primo Space Fund, CDTI Innvierte, and former ArianeGroup CEO Andre-Hubert Roussel, bringing total funding raised to over EUR 31 million. At the time of the raise the company reported eight active contracts with private and institutional clients and a pipeline of identified opportunities near EUR 120 million. The founding and leadership team includes CEO Adria Argemi (ex-Airbus) alongside co-founders with backgrounds at Northrop Grumman and Avio, and the company employs staff of more than fourteen nationalities across its Barcelona and Toulouse sites.