The Fabless Gamble:

Infinite Orbits' €150M Backlog and the Hidden Cost of Supplier Failure

When Atomos Space’s co-founder sat down in late 2022 to write the company’s year-end review, he didn’t mince words. The Colorado-based satellite servicing startup had spent the year wrestling with supply chain gremlins, vendor inflation that refused to quit, and challenging capital markets that made fundraising feel like pulling teeth. The solution? Bring manufacturing in-house. Go vertical.

For a company with fewer than 50 employees, that’s not a casual pivot—it’s a capital structure earthquake. Your capital needs shift from lean R&D to sustained manufacturing capex—from outsourced flexibility to in-house overhead. It means hiring specialized engineers. It means your burn rate just got heavier, and your path to profitability just got longer.

Fast forward to November 2025, and Infinite Orbits—a French in-space servicing competitor—just raised €40 million (≈$47 million) to do the exact opposite. They’re doubling down on a fabless model, outsourcing manufacturing while keeping core intellectual property (their rendezvous and docking tech) proprietary. They’re opening offices across five European countries. And they’re sitting on a €150 million (≈$176 million) backlog that needs to be delivered over the next three years.

Here’s the question that should keep investors up at night: What happens if Infinite Orbits’ suppliers fail? What’s the contingency cost if they’re forced to follow Atomos down the vertical integration path—halfway through executing that backlog?

When the Fabless Model Breaks

Atomos Space didn’t choose vertical integration because they read a Harvard Business School case study and thought it sounded smart. They chose it because their supply chain was actively sabotaging them.

In their 2022 review, the company was blunt about what forced their hand: unreliable suppliers, quality control issues that kept cropping up, and vendor pricing that made budgets look like rough drafts. When you’re trying to prove out rendezvous and docking technology—the kind of precision engineering where a millimeter matters—you can’t afford components that arrive late or don’t meet spec.