By Juliette Otterburn-Hall, Value Squared

The space industry is no longer a niche reserved for governments and a handful of prime contractors. Driven by private investment, commercial innovation and rapid technological progress, Space has become one of the most dynamic and high-potential sectors globally. Yet for many organisations, the real question is no longer whether to engage with space – but how to do so in a way that genuinely drives growth and long-term value.

For those already operating in the sector, scaling beyond traditional industry multiples can prove challenging. For those looking in from the outside, breaking into what remains a relatively insular ecosystem is equally difficult. In both cases, the constraint is often the same: treating space as a standalone industry rather than as part of a broader strategic model.

A more powerful approach is to position space as one vertical within a wider, multi-vertical business strategy. The companies struggling to scale in space – and the ones hesitating to enter it – are often making the same mistake: they’re treating it as an end destination rather than a strategic lever. Space, on its own, is still a relatively closed ecosystem. It can be difficult to break into, slow to scale within and – if you stay too contained – limiting in terms of valuation.

Rather than just asking “How do we build a space business?”, the question we think is more helpful is “How does space make our overall business more valuable?” The most successful companies today don’t rely on a single sector to drive growth. They build capabilities that travel across industries, markets and use cases. In that model, space becomes something different. In this context, space becomes more than an opportunity – it becomes a lever for value creation. It sharpens technologies. It stress-tests operating models. It opens up high-value applications that can be translated elsewhere. And when it’s connected to other verticals, it accelerates both innovation and scale.

This shift unlocks tangible advantages. Businesses can diversify risk, open up new revenue streams, and accelerate innovation across sectors. Proven models can be adapted and scaled, while exposure to multiple markets increases agility and responsiveness. These characteristics are increasingly recognised by investors, who reward businesses that demonstrate both scalability and resilience.

Operating across verticals – especially when one of them is as complex as space – requires a different level of discipline. You need to be clear on what’s core and transferable versus what’s context-specific, you need operating models that can stretch without breaking and very importantly, you need stakeholder alignment – because without it, multi-vertical quickly becomes multi-fragmented. Execution is where many strategies succeed or fail.

Moving from concept to delivery demands clarity on where value is truly created, alignment across leadership, and a structured approach to scaling. We’re seeing more leadership teams challenge themselves to ask harder questions: Where is value actually created in our business? What can scale and what can’t? And what does our organisation need to look like in order to deliver on those value and scale? These conversations are becoming a critical part of how businesses prepare for growth and investment for those within the Space sector, and those looking to enter it.

The companies that will increase valuation and lead the market in the next phase won’t be the ones that confine themselves to space. They’ll be the ones that connect it – into a broader, more scalable story about value creation.

This is the focus of a new series of our Value Squared workshops that we kicked off at SpaceComm, designed to support companies and investors navigating this transition – whether integrating space into an existing portfolio or scaling beyond it. The opportunity in space is undeniable, but its real impact is realised when it is connected to a broader vision for growth.

The organisations that will lead in this next phase are those that think beyond industry boundaries, build capabilities that travel, and use space not as an endpoint – but as a catalyst.

By Todd Padwick.

If you’re building dual-use engineering products, your website has to do more than just explain what you do. It needs to keep up with rapid innovation cycles and build credibility for multiple use cases.

But if you’re using all-in-one website platforms like WordPress, Magento or Drupal you may already be experiencing the following challenges:

• Plugin-heavy setups that slow the site and create a messy editor experience
• Stale webpage content that is hard to refresh or update
• Difficulty scaling into new markets or languages without expensive redevelopment
• Inability to adapt product messaging for different sectors or regulatory frameworks
• Technical content trapped as PDFs, such as whitepapers and datasheets, instead of discoverable content
• Multiple subsidiary websites create duplication of work
• Lack of visibility in search and AI chatbots, limiting inbound leads
• A sales process that is manual and labour-intensive, disconnected from the tools your team prefers

These issues happen because all-in-one platforms force everything into a single system. 

That works early on, but it becomes a constraint as soon as the business evolves.

Most companies only realise this when they’re forced into a rebuild.

Build a system that can evolve with you

If you’re in the space sector, you probably need to:

• Tailor your narrative for investors and VCs by launching industry-specific landing pages quickly
• Publish technical content once and distribute it across every channel and locale automatically
• Shift seamlessly from R&D to commercial deployment by integrating quote-based or wholesale workflows
• Adapt to new uses and regulatory frameworks by localising messaging and your business offering
• Test defence-focused messaging privately, while keeping climate-facing positioning public
• Promote product USPs without exposing sensitive IP
• Support region-sensitive hardware sales with gated access and tiered pricing

To achieve all this and more, you need a website that is modular, scalable and enables low-friction change over time. And that’s where Composable Architecture comes in.  

Composable website architecture is an alternative approach to common all-in-one platforms that is infinitely scalable without vendor lock-in. Instead of finding one system to do everything, you break your website into smaller, connected cloud services – content, users, commerce, and products – all independent of each other.

That allows you to:

• Replace parts of your setup without starting again
• Reuse content and systems for multiple purposes
• Scale each part of the website independently as needed

More importantly, it gives you options.

You’re not locked into one way of working, and you’re not rebuilding every time the business changes direction.

Keep things affordable from day one and advance as you grow

A composable setup is only as complex as you need it to be. You can keep costs low on launch, while introducing new tools as your requirements change.

That’s the key difference.

With platforms like WordPress, you tend to hit a ceiling and rebuild.
With composable, you extend what you already have.

How can Function & Form help

Function & Form is a London-based studio working with hardware and engineering-led companies.

They build websites and brands that can adapt at scale – from early-stage funding through to commercial growth.

If you want to explore what that could look like for your business visit their website:
https://www.functionandform.co.uk/

The East Anglian contamination control specialists have a string of exhibitions across a variety of sectors to look forward to, as well two glitzy awards evenings

GUARDTECH’S Commercial Team are ready to spring into action with a packed programme of exhibitions, conferences and awards events across April and May, as the business heads into one of its busiest stretches of the year on the networking calendar.

With spring traditionally bringing fresh energy across the Life Sciences and High-Tech Engineering sectors, the coming weeks will see the team out in force at a series of major industry gatherings – meeting customers, partners and fellow innovators while flying the flag for Guardtech’s cleanroom expertise.

First on the schedule is Making Pharmaceuticals 2026, which returns to the Coventry Building Society Arena on 21-22 April.

One of the UK’s best-known events for Pharmaceutical manufacturing and supply chain professionals, the show offers Guardtech a strong platform to discuss modular cleanroom construction, rapid cleanroom systems and contamination control solutions with visitors from across the Pharma landscape.

Just a day later the team will be once again celebrating their innovation excellence at the Medilink Midlands Business Awards at the Empire Banqueting Hall in Leicester, where leading Healthtech and Life Sciences businesses from across the region will come together to celebrate ingenuity, collaboration and commercial success.

Guardtech are nominated for the Corporate Social Responsibility Champion award for their groundbreaking Cleancube container lab for Biotech company Oxitec, who will be undertaking potentially life-saving GMO work with mosquitoes in a bid to combat malaria.

May then begins with London Lab Live at ExCeL London on 6-7 May – an event that brings together thousands of laboratory leaders, scientists, engineers and technology providers to explore the future of lab infrastructure and innovation.

Later in the month (20-21 May), the team take on a Birmingham ‘double header’, with both the Cleanroom Technology Conference at the National Conference Centre and Chem UK at the NEC running concurrently, as well as attending the Bionow Pharma Manufacturing Conference 2026 in Liverpool on 21 May.

Associate Commercial Director Joe Shackley said: “Spring is always an exciting time because the events season really starts to come alive, and this year we’ve got a brilliant run of shows and networking opportunities ahead of us.

“We’re looking forward to getting out there, meeting leading lights from Life Sciences and High-Tech Engineering, and having some great conversations about how Guardtech can support the next wave of cleanroom installation projects across many different critical sectors.”

The spring expo schedule rounds off with Semiconductors Ireland 2026 on 26 May at The Johnstown Estate in Co. Meath, another important date in the diary as Guardtech look to expand their reach in the world of Micro-electronics.

But that’s not the end of the springtime successes – as ANOTHER awards evening will take place the following week, where Guardtech are up for the Business of the Year More Than 50 Employees and High Growth Business of the Year at the SME Cambridgeshire Business Awards.

An evening of glitz, glamour and drama awaits at the Delta Hotels by Marriott, Huntingdon on 2 June.

With a busy spring on the horizon and a calendar full of opportunities to connect, collaborate and share ideas, Guardtech’s Commercial Team are ready to bloom.

For more information on Guardtech and to discover more about the company’s various cleanroom construction offerings, visit www.guardtech.com, email sales@guardtech.com or call 0330 113 0303.

By Andrew J Lewis. Contact: ceo@globalymbe.space

Meet DETENTE, an independent vehicle mission management system able to support, and in some cases sustain, spacecraft decision-making when delay, distance and uncertainty make constant human supervision impractical. Rather than acting as a narrow autopilot, DETENTE is being shaped as a modular mission mind: a software architecture that can weigh conditions, update priorities, learn from outcomes, and recommend or execute bounded decisions in pursuit of mission success.

What makes this especially exciting is that DETENTE is not conceived as a monolithic block of code. Its design is modular by intention. Separate functional layers can represent internal state, environmental perception, motivational pressure, action selection, reinforcement, and policy persistence. That matters in space operations, because real missions do not fail or succeed on one variable alone. They succeed because power, thermal state, timing, risk, payload needs, communications windows, vehicle health and mission objectives are continuously balanced. A modular architecture gives us a way to model that balancing act transparently, test it incrementally, and refine it without rebuilding the whole system each time.

Scientifically, DETENTE draws on a mixture of behavioural reinforcement logic, affective state modelling, and structured policy adaptation. In practical terms, the system is being tested not only for whether it “does something”, but whether it changes in a disciplined way after experience. Current test outputs focus on learning events, valence shifts, and policy evolution across persistence chains. In particular, the project incudes concepts modelled from Aristotle, Jeremy Bentham, Sigmund Freud, Plutchik et al and BF Skinner.

That is why the recent test runs have been so encouraging. They suggest DETENTE is already becoming more than a scripted rules engine. The architecture is showing the kind of structured internal change one would hope to see in a future mission-management layer: not consciousness, not mystique, but an orderly capacity to register conditions, select among pressures, and alter later behaviour in light of earlier results. For a deep-space vehicle, that opens an important prospect. A system of this kind could one day help arbitrate between competing demands such as conserving energy, preserving vehicle viability, maintaining timetable discipline, or delaying a manoeuvre when system stress is rising.

The space application is therefore not speculative ornament. It is a natural destination for the design philosophy. A vehicle in transit to the outer Solar System, or operating at great light-time distance, needs more than sensors and actuators. It needs an internal executive layer able to interpret mission context and remain robust when conditions are imperfect. DETENTE is being developed with precisely that sort of bounded autonomy in mind.

Just as important, DETENTE is not the end of the story. It is also feeding into COLLEGIUM, the broader multi-agent research environment now being prepared around heterogeneous agents with differing traits, action biases and social roles. The project aim there is to move beyond isolated behaviour into interaction, reciprocity, cooperation, conflict and emergent order. In that sense, DETENTE is both an operational mission concept in its own right and a foundational module inside a larger experimental framework.

That combination is what gives the programme its momentum. We are not simply building a control routine. We are exploring whether a spacecraft can be given a disciplined internal decision architecture — one that is modular, testable, extensible and ultimately capable of supporting the next generation of autonomous mission operations.

Contact us today!

Andrew J Lewis Msc FLS MIET

Chief Future Officer. Globalymbe Limited Contact: ceo@globalymbe.space

About Globalymbe Limited:
Globalymbe Limited is a UK micro-SME developing a distinctive portfolio of applied intelligence systems across strategic risk, environmental insight, behavioural simulation, and advanced decision support. Its domains span geopolitics and peace-building, climate and infrastructure analytics, energy and commercial assurance, and experimental multi-agent software for mission management and organisational reasoning.

The company’s ambition is to turn rigorous interdisciplinary thinking into practical, market-ready tools that help institutions and enterprises anticipate change, test scenarios, and make better long-range decisions under uncertainty.

Mid Suffolk District Council’s state of the art innovation hub, Stowmarket Innovation Gateway, is nearing completion and will open its doors to businesses in Spring 2026. Located in the Gateway 14 Freeport Zone in Stowmarket, this brand new multi-use innovation building will be run by Hethel Innovation and is designed to accelerate the adoption of emerging technologies across our industries, businesses and communities.

The centre is located at the heart of Gateway 14 – the business, innovation and logistics park that forms part of Freeport East, adjacent to Junction 50 of the A14 in Stowmarket.

• State of the art, sustainable design: Stowmarket Innovation Gateway is a newly built, architect-led space using sustainable materials to BREEAM Excellent standard. Every office, co-working area and meeting room is designed for collaboration, wellbeing and flexibility.
• Exceptional financial benefits: Tenants in Freeport East enjoy government incentives until 2036, including Enhanced Capital Allowance, Employer NICs relief, and Customs and Duty Benefits – all applied automatically, reducing costs, boosting investment returns and helping businesses scale and invest with confidence in the region.
• Ultra-fast digital connectivity: Stowmarket Innovation Gateway provides 10Gbps fibre connectivity for seamless data transfer, 4K streaming and cloud-based operations.
• Access to knowledge and talent: Tenants connect to leading innovation networks, including the National AI Hub in Generative Models, University of Essex and University of Suffolk, benefiting from mentoring, funding routes and the latest breakthroughs in technology.
• Workshops and skills courses covering both legacy and emerging technologies, including Large Language Models (LLMs) and the next evolution of generative AI: AI agents (or agentic AI).
• Designed for growth: Flexible workspaces, five meeting/training rooms, two Board Rooms with AV tech and vibrant communal areas foster networking, collaboration and business growth within Suffolk’s dynamic enterprise cluster.

Facilities:

• Office Suites from 18 sq. m. (195 sq. ft.), larger suites also available
• 60+ Co-Working / Hot-Desking Spaces
• Meeting and Training Rooms for Hire
• Event Facilities for up to 100 delegates
• On-Site Café with locally sourced food

SEE THE BROCHURE HERE

Contact:

Anyone interested in finding out more about the space, tenancy, hotdesking and training opportunities on offer at the Stowmarket Innovation Gateway can contact Hethel Innovation at enquiries@hethelinnovation.com

Contact: Valentino Caridi

Website: www.stowmarketinnovationgateway.com/

Mark Wheeler announced as new Managing Director as Guardtech mark beginning of new era with company rebrand

The Suffolk-based cleanroom construction specialists’ family of brands will all fall under the simplified umbrella title of ‘Guardtech’ from now on.

A NEW era of cleanroom construction excellence is on the horizon after East Anglian contamination control experts Guardtech announced the ascension of Mark Wheeler to the role of Managing Director.

Wheeler is stepping up from the role of Commercial Director to take on the MD position, with his father and company owner Ray Wheeler becoming Chairman and Conor Barwise retaining his position as Projects Director.

The trio will continue to act as the company’s Board-level leaders, with four Associate Directors covering Commercial, Operations, Manufacturing and Finance/HR beneath them.

The move co-aligns with a strategic decision to drop the word ‘Group’ from the company’s ‘Guardtech Group’ umbrella title and return to being known simply as ‘Guardtech’.

Existing brands Cleanroom Solutions (large-scale turnkey), Guardtech Cleanrooms (modular specialists), Cleancube Mobile Cleanrooms (container facilities), Isopod Rapid Cleanrooms (quick-assembly pod systems), Guardware Cleanroom Hardware (furniture & equipment) and Isoblok Pre-fab Cleanrooms (pre-fabricated block systems) remain the core family of companies falling under the overarching ‘Guardtech’ umbrella.

Wheeler, who in his role as Commercial Director has helped steer the company from a turnover of around £2.5m in 2019 to a projected £25m in 2026, is excited about what the future holds for a 26-year-old family business steeped in innovation, thought leadership and exceptional delivery.

“It’s a true honour, and the next stage on a really exciting journey,” said Wheeler. “Building on my father’s legacy in contamination control is something dear to my heart.

“Standing alongside him and a long-standing friend in Conor Barwise, working together to oversee our evolution from a small-scale operation to one of the UK’s leading cleanroom construction companies, it’s been a thrilling journey so far.

“There have been many challenges along the way, and obstacles we’ve fought hard to overcome, but driving a business that has innovation at its core, that supports ground-breaking scientific initiatives, that helps engineering firms deliver positive, life-altering change for humanity, it’s incredibly special.

“I’m immensely proud of all the amazing projects we’ve delivered so far – and excited about what’s to come as we continue to grow our family business exponentially.”

Wheeler has been working in the cleanroom industry for more than 20 years. His journey began in the late 90s, learning the ropes by supporting his father Ray at cleanroom consumables supplier Guardline Technology.

After Guardline was acquired by Micronclean, Mark continued to work for the latter in an international sales & marketing role and building on his growing knowledge of cleanroom operations before returning to work alongside father Ray at fledgling cleanroom construction company Guardtech Cleanrooms in the early 2000s.

As Commercial Director, Mark led the business’ restructure to the Guardtech Group in 2022 – a family of brands covering all cleanroom construction bases from large-scale turnkey projects to small modular pods, pre-fabricated container facilities to traditional modular cleanrooms.

As a result of that strategic restructuring, rebranding, product innovation, research & development and a persistent quest for excellence, Mark helped Guardtech grow from 10 members of staff in 2020 to 70 in 2026, with turnover rising from £2.5 million to £17.7 million last year.

“From the hard graft of those early days of Guardtech Cleanrooms through to the acquisition of Cleanroom Solutions, the relentless growth of Cleancube to the remarkable development of Isopod, we remain committed to providing world-class solutions for clients changing the world for the better.

“Leading an organisation that provides the platform for so much positive change in the world, across the wide spectrum of Life Sciences and High-Tech Engineering, is something that I’m hugely proud of, and I remain as dedicated as ever to continue our mission to become the UK’s leading provider of contamination control products and services.”

For more information on Guardtech, email sales@guardtech.com, call 0330 113 0303 or visit www.guardtech.com.

By Millie Martin, Cambridge Kinetics.

The space sector is no stranger to complexity. Whether you are managing a supply chain for satellite components or scaling a deep tech startup, the operational data challenge is real: information scattered across spreadsheets, systems that do not talk to each other, and teams spending time on manual processes rather than mission critical work.

AI is increasingly being positioned as the answer. The honest truth that it can be, but only if organisations approach it in the right way.

The gap most businesses face is not a shortage of enthusiasm. Most teams are already experimenting with tools like ChatGPT. The problem is imagination: knowing how to apply AI meaningfully to your own operations, rather than bolting it onto a process that was already broken.

A common mistake is trying to optimise a single step in a broken workflow rather than rethinking the end-to-end journey. In a sector where precision and traceability matters, from R&D through to programme delivery, that distinction is critical. A broken process, digitalised, is still a broken process.

The biggest blockers to meaningful adoption tend to be a combination of data foundations and organisational culture. If your core information still lives in disconnected spreadsheets, there is a limit to what any AI tool can do. The insight comes from structure, connected data, and getting there requires clearly defined processes and a central place where information flows correctly.

Culture plays an equally important role. There is a tendency to assume that digital transformation projects will be slow and painful, and that assumption often becomes self-fulfilling. The organisations what see the best outcomes are those where leadership actively brings teams on the journey with them, explaining the reasoning behind change, showing early wins and creating genuine space for experimentation without fear of failure.

The same principle applies to customer and stakeholder experience. Many organisations default to deploying AI at the customer-facing layer, through chatbots and automated responses when the greater opportunity lies behind the scenes. AI works best in the middle of operations: processing, matching and analysing. The goal should be giving your team better information, faster, so they can spend more time on the high-quality interactions that actually build trust.

For space sector organisations considering where to start, the practical advice is consistent: begin with a single process or data problem, fix it properly, and build from there. Doing nothing is the real risk. The competitive gap between organisations that engage with AI thoughtfully, and those that wait is widening, and in a sector moving at pace, that gap matters.

Kinabase is a AI-powered workflow platform designed to improve business operations. It brings data into one central place, automates the routing of work, and keeps teams aligned across processes and departments. Find out more at Kinabase.com