Northern Private Capital made international headlines when in late 2019 they announced that they were buying Canada’s iconic space company MDA from Maxar. Is the company ready to make another investment in a Canadian space company?
One of the participants at a virtual panel on “Canada in Orbit: The Business of Space” was Andrew Lapham, CEO of Northern Private Capital (NPC). The event was held Wednesday, July 7, 2021 and organized by the not-for-profit Space Place Planetarium Canada. Space Place Canada was created with the goal of bringing a public planetarium back to Toronto. Their efforts also include raising public awareness about space. Prior to the start of the panel discussion, moderator Susan Visser announced that Space Place Canada had officially been approved as a charity which will help the organization in its efforts to raise funds.
Other panelists included Nathan de Ruiter, Managing Director Canada for Euroconsult and Pat Nihill, Vice President of Strategy at MDA.
While panelists answered questions on a variety of questions readers of SpaceQ will be familiar with, there was one question in particular that got my attention. It was directed at Andrew Lapham and concerned other companies NPC invests in or are interested in from the space sector.
Lapham made it clear that NPC are “generalist investors” and it was clear that MDA has been the only space sector investment they’ve made to date but that as a result of their investment in MDA that they were “much more plugged in to the the investment world and investment opportunities in space.”
With respect to more investments in the space sector he said the following, “anything we see that would fit, that would be a strategic fit for MDA, we would pass right along to MDA and Pat (Nihill) would probably see it before I did anyway.” He then went on to say “we do definitely look at a variety of sort of space based business opportunities, that don’t compete or touch where MDA is in the space. And, you know, we pay very close attention to them. Because I think the same trends we believe in are empowering some of those business cases and making it possible to deliver services from space that you wouldn’t have been able to deliver five years ago or 10 years ago. And so, you know we’re trying to be very open minded and very inquisitive about that. And we’re looking at, and we’re doing due diligence on a company right now that’s got a space based business model to deliver a type of communication service.”
Naturally Lapham did not name the company, but we can speculate. To start, It’s important to understand that NPC invests primarily in Canadian companies. Of the seven investments the company has publicly listed on their website, five of them are Canadian companies. So while it’s possible that NPC could invest in a space communication company from outside of Canada, there are a couple of Canadian options that come to mind, Telesat and Kepler Communications.
Telesat is in the midst of gearing up for its Initial Public Offering (IPO) likely happening in Q3. Would NPC invest in Telesat ahead of the IPO?
Kepler Communication is an interesting option. The company announced a month ago the closing of its US$60 million Series B round of funding. Could NPC be interested in their Series C? Kepler has big plans that include building two communication constellations with a combined 500 satellites.
Regardless of if, or what space company NPC is invests in, Lapham made it clear that the space sector is on their radar. That more investment firms are aware of, and interested in space companies, bodes well for startups.