10 of the Most Exciting Frontier Tech Companies from Elsewhere

On October 7th, 2023, at 2:19 am, on a windy military base in southeastern Spain, a sleek rocket prototype roared to an altitude of 46km (29 miles) before descending back to Earth by parachute. No crowds of tourists. No flashy billionaire cameo. Just a group of engineers celebrating Europe’s first fully private rocket to successfully reach space.

PLD Space makes orbital and suborbital launches more accessible to smaller enterprises, universities, and research labs without bottomless budgets. PLD Space’s goal would have seemed impossible only a few years ago when costs were higher and market readiness was lacking. Things have changed. The Spanish company did it with only $130M in funding to date. 

Endeavor — which has been around since 1997 and supported 90 unicorns so far — works with many founders of companies like PLD Space, driving cutting-edge innovation in what we call frontier tech. Space. Biohacking. AI-driven manufacturing and logistics. Blockchain. 

These companies are redefining what frontier tech will mean in the coming years, and building viable businesses around that. Here are nine more of the most interesting companies we’re supporting now. 

Submer, Spain

Submer puts the “cool” in data-center cooling, which is one of the most pressing challenges in high-performance computing. Rather than relying on traditional air conditioners, the founders built an immersion-cooling system that submerges server components in a specially formulated biodegradable liquid, making them 95% more efficient. This lowers operating costs for anyone running resource-intensive workloads like AI or advanced analytics, all while mitigating their environmental impact.

Founded in 2015 by Daniel Pope and Pol Valls in Barcelona, Spain, and selected by Endeavor in 2024, Submer’s story is also one about timing. They applied and got rejected by Y Combinator in 2016, when the problem didn’t seem so big. As data center power demand exploded in recent years (with 160% growth predicted by 2030), however, the company is now valued at $500M. 

Maybell Quantum, Denmark/USA

Like Submer, Maybell Quantum are working to ensure that the pace of technological innovation doesn’t destroy the planet we’re innovating for. In their case, the answer for the big scientific problems and breakthroughs facing us looks an awful lot like something you might have in your own home: a fridge. But these fridges don’t fit in your kitchens; rather, they’re made for laboratories, where they make quantum computing possible and offer new opportunities for scientific study.

The Maybell Quantum Big Fridge is roughly 270 times colder than deep space and 200,000 times colder than the coldest temperature ever recorded on Earth, while the company itself has joined projects to mine helium-3 on the moon and launch projects in South Korea, the US, and more. And it does it while protecting the environment, with only one-tenth of the carbon footprint of typical dilution refrigerators. 

OneSkin, Brazil/USA

The ancient Romans were known for applying both lanolin and sulfur. Cleopatra famously bathed in donkey milk. Skincare is as old as human civilization. But technology offers new ways to understand and treat our skin, and with fewer side effects than the poor Romans faced.

Founded by an all-woman team of Brazilian scientists and based in San Francisco, OneSkin has embraced cutting-edge treatment with particular enthusiasm. The company developed a proprietary platform which tested skincare products on a cellular level, using DNA biomarkers and lab-grown 3D skin models. After screening over 900 peptides, OneSkin discovered the OS-01 peptide: the only molecule on the market scientifically proven to reverse aging. 

That breakthrough is at the centre of OneSkin’s product range, which is beloved by Jennifer Aniston and recently announced a $20M Series A from Prelude Growth Partners. 

Dronamics, Bulgaria

The world’s first cargo drone airline. Think of all the hard-to-reach communities, distant warehouses, or remote facilities in need of crucial supplies — Dronamics’ fixed-wing drones are built exactly for that. By leveraging lightweight aircraft and shorter runways, they deliver faster and cheaper than standard cargo operations, with up to 60% lower emissions and carrying up to 350kg (772lb) over 2,500 km.

Founded by brothers Svilen and Konstantin Rangelov, who are economists and aerospace engineers, respectively, in 2014. They went on to raise $40M in funding and partner with organizations like the International Air Transport Association to expand their global footprint.

Satellogic, Argentina

When Argentine Emiliano Kargieman brought Satellogic to Endeavor’s attention, our mentors admired how the company was “using nanosatellites to give the Earth a checkup”. Like Google Earth on steroids, Satellogic is building a real-time, zoom-in-anywhere Planet Earth dashboard that makes it easier for us to tackle big issues facing the world. Food, climate, security — all of these fields benefit from the (much more than) bird’s eye viewpoint Satellogic offers.

With over $100M raised and a successful public listing on Nasdaq via a SPAC in 2022, Satellogic is democratizing access to geospatial intelligence — once the domain of governments and billion-dollar corporations.

ICEYE, Finland/Poland

ICEYE began with tracking Arctic ice-melt to open safer shipping routes like the Northern Sea Route, and expanded to monitoring Amazon deforestation and urban infrastructure. More recently, the company predicted volcanic activity in Iceland and partnered with the Icelandic government to issue evacuation warnings a week before the volcano erupted. 

Started in Finland with deep roots in Poland — by co-founders from both nations — ICEYE owns and operates the world’s largest Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) satellite constellation, delivering satellite imagery from anywhere in the globe within 30 minutes of acquisition — an industry-leading speed.

PhageLab, Chile

Antibiotics are the backbone of modern medicine; they’re also under threat. Too much of the food we eat comes from animals over-treated with antibiotics, leading to widespread antibiotic resistance. To ensure antibiotics remain effective, we need to find different ways to treat animals. 

Enter PhageLab, which has come a long way since the founders first sold their PlayStations and mountain bikes to raise capital for their company.

Bacteriophages (also known as phages) are naturally-occurring viruses that target and eliminate bacterial cells without harming human or animal cells, but they’re difficult to apply at scale.  PhageLab is using AI-powered software that can create a specific, custom-made phage cocktail for any given bacteria sample. Imagine a farmer sending a sample of an infection and having a cure sent back, without the risk of more antibiotic resistance for human consumers. 

Stämm, Argentina

A few decades ago in Argentina, a grandfather taught two cousins to brew beer. Juan Francisco Llamazares Vegh (who goes by Yuyo) and his cousin, Federico D’Alvia Vegh, quickly became obsessed with the lack of good yeast available for craft beer, and Yuyo, who’d studied agriculture engineering, phytopathology, and bioprocess, began to explore the idea of biomanufacturing. The problem was that the biomanufacturing process required huge-scale production plants, and was extremely expensive. The two cousins wondered: Could we make it easier?

Stämm is Yuyo and Federico’s solution to that problem. After years of research and development, Stämm patented a continuous-flow bioreactor, which drastically improves the efficiency and scalability of biomanufacturing operations. The results go far beyond craft beer: Biomanufacturing is crucial for developing and producing pharmaceutical drugs, which, up until now, have been hindered by the capacity of biomanufacturing infrastructure. 

Now, after a successful $17M Series A in 2022, Stämm is also working to accelerate cultivated meat, increase antibody production, and more. Maybe they’ll find some time for craft beer along the way.

WSense, Italy

The Internet of Things — talking fridge, lights that work by voice command — has long gone from science fiction to everyday reality. It’s hard to imagine daily life without the many objects embedded with internet capacity, and for many businesses, it’s equally hard to imagine life without the connectivity, data, engagement, and reporting that the Internet of Things offers. But it does have a blind spot — a big one. Seventy-two percent of the Earth’s surface is covered by water, where up until now, the Internet of Things has not been able to reach.

Chiara Petrioli, Professor of Computer Engineering at Sapienza University and founder of WSense, is changing this. Her company wants to build the “Internet of Underwater Things,” developing new technology that can both collect and transmit data underwater, a key challenge for companies across the energy, defense, and environmental monitoring sectors. WSense’s most recent victory is a €7.2M ($8.4M) funding round as it pursues further geographical and commercial expansion. 

From deep sea to deep space, from breweries to laboratories, these companies are utilizing the cutting edge of technology to build the products we’ll take for granted in a few decades. Some of them — like WSense and Maybell Quantum — are only recent additions to Endeavor’s companies. 

Check out our full list of new Endeavor Entrepreneurs to explore the others.