Economic Observer reporter Wang Yajie

At the end of 2025, when the concept sector of "commercial aerospace" was stirred up by policies in the A-share market, Tianyi Space Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Tianyi Research Institute") quietly completed its D+round of financing. In its newly introduced shareholder list, Wuxi Liangxi Science and Technology Innovation Industry Investment Fund is prominently listed. At this moment, it has been a full nine years since this company launched its first satellite into space in 2016.

It was during these nine years that China's commercial aerospace industry completed a difficult transition from the policy ice breaking "PPT star making" craze to the critical stage of proving its commercial sustainability. On the secondary market, the "Commercial Aerospace" index has fluctuated significantly under the stimulation of favorable policies, and related concept stocks are highly sought after. But behind the noise, the financing logic of the primary market has become increasingly strict, and investors' questions have shifted from "whether they can go to heaven" to "when to make money"; The differentiation of the industry track is intensifying, and companies lacking clear profit paths are facing risks.

At the crossroads of industry development, the development trajectory of Tianyi Research Institute provides an observational sample. Tianyi Research Institute is one of the earliest commercial satellite companies in China. After entering the commercial satellite industry, Tianyi Research Institute did not follow the noisy "Internet Constellation Blueprint", but shifted its business focus to the independent operation of "Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) Satellite Constellation", and bet on the future of the company.

At present, China's commercial aerospace mainly competes fiercely around the satellite Internet, remote sensing, navigation and other major tracks. Among them, the remote sensing field is further divided into optical satellites mainly for taking pictures and SAR satellites mainly for radar detection. The Tianyi Research Institute has chosen the SAR sub track with higher technological barriers and fewer players. This is in sharp contrast to some "commercial aerospace concept stocks" in the capital market with complex or still in the conceptual stage of business - Tianyi Research Institute is taking a highly focused path on specific data services and has achieved full chain verification from satellite manufacturing to in orbit operation.

In the view of Ren Weijia, co-founder and chief technology officer of Tianyi Research Institute, the transformation process of its business model from "project-based" to "service operation" condenses the typical propositions faced by Chinese commercial aerospace enterprises: the balance between technological ideals and commercial reality, the time difference between capital expectations and market maturity, and the wisdom of finding independent living space in competition with the "national team".

Focusing on the Tianyi Research Institute is precisely paying attention to whether China's commercial aerospace industry can transcend the stage of storytelling and truly move towards commercial maturity. What kind of business model is ultimately needed to support the journey of the starry sea?

'Broken Window'

Back more than ten years ago, the main stage of China's aerospace industry was dominated by the "national team" - core technology, mission planning and launch resources were all concentrated in the two major aerospace groups and the Chinese Academy of Sciences. For private capital and technological forces, "aerospace" is a field that they look up to but cannot touch.

The change began in 2014. In October of that year, the State Council issued the "Guiding Opinions on Innovating Investment and Financing Mechanisms in Key Areas to Encourage Social Investment", which for the first time explicitly proposed to "encourage private capital to participate in the construction of national civil space infrastructure". This document is like a stone thrown into Jinghu Lake, causing ripples in the market.

The real 'policy window' was forcefully pushed open in 2015. In October of that year, the National Medium - and Long Term Development Plan for Civil Space Infrastructure (2015-2025) was officially issued. This guiding document clearly plans for the construction of satellite remote sensing, communication, navigation and other systems involving commercial capital and market entities, providing legitimacy and policy basis for private capital to enter the fields of satellite manufacturing, launch and even operation services from the national top-level design. The sudden release of social forces and market vitality.

Ren Weijia recalled that at that time, he held an important technical position within the national aerospace research system, but the spring tide of the market outside the window was already clearly audible. He truly felt that a historic opportunity was opening up.

Similar to Ren Weijia's experience, there is also a group of technical personnel with deep aerospace "bloodlines", including satellite designers, payload experts, and engineers who have undertaken multiple launch missions. Their common understanding is that with the maturity of satellite miniaturization and modular technology, as well as the potential space for reducing rocket launch costs, there is a space for the "national team" to have no time to fully consider the micro nano satellite market for specific commercial and scientific research needs, while civilian forces can exert their fists and feet.

Yang Feng, the founder of Tianyi Research Institute, is one of the pioneers who keenly captured this "window period". In 2015, he decided to return to his hometown Hunan from Beijing and start preparing for entrepreneurship in Changsha High tech Zone. Choosing Changsha instead of Beijing and Shanghai, which have a deeper accumulation of aerospace industry, is based on a pragmatic survival wisdom: controlling the high operating costs in the start-up stage and seeking policy and financial support from local governments for emerging industries.

This founding team mainly comes from the manned spaceflight application system team of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. This' background 'became their credit endorsement for gaining customer trust and communicating with the industry chain in the early days.

In January 2016, Changsha Tianyi Space Technology Research Institute Co., Ltd. (predecessor of Tianyi Research Institute) was officially registered and established. The company's entry point is extremely cautious, even somewhat inconspicuous: providing micro/nano satellite carrying experiments and short cycle, low-cost space science verification services to domestic and foreign universities and research institutions. This is a clear and segmented market that avoids direct competition with the "national team" in the field of large-scale application satellites, but its technological threshold is sufficient to build initial barriers and quickly verify the team's basic capabilities in the entire process from design, development to coordinated launch. At the same time, it is highly compatible with the team's inherent genes in the field of space applications, which is conducive to quickly establishing local competitive advantages. In Ren Weijia's words, this is to first address whether there are any issues.

On November 10 of the same year, the first satellite of Tianyi Research Institute, "Xiaoxiang-1", was successfully launched into orbit by the Long March 11 carrier rocket at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center. This CubeSat, weighing only 8 kilograms, has become China's first scientific experimental satellite independently developed and launched by a purely private enterprise.

The symbolic significance of that moment far exceeded its commercial value, as it proved to the market the feasibility of private forces independently creating stars and soaring into the sky.

In the early days of Tianyi Research Institute, the business model was a typical "project-based" approach: accepting orders, developing, launching, and delivering. Every research project can bring in revenue, maintain company operations, and accumulate valuable engineering experience, but the growth ceiling is within reach. The shadow of the "valley of death" commonly faced by commercial aerospace companies has emerged. After successfully launching a satellite, how to transform a single success into replicable, scalable, and sustainable commercial revenue has become the sword of Damocles hanging over the heads of all the first batch of commercial aerospace entrepreneurs. They have overcome the first hurdle of policy and technology, only to find themselves at the starting point of a more complex and lengthy exploration of business models.

Bet On SAR

The early "project-based" survival model cannot support the long-term development of a company. The team at Tianyi Research Institute is well aware that it is necessary to find a main road that can form a commercial closed loop and has the potential for scale growth.

The turning point came at the end of 2020, but its brewing period was much earlier.

On December 22, 2020, the "Hai Si 1" SAR satellite, jointly developed by Tianyi Research Institute, China Electronics Technology Group Corporation (CETC) 38th Institute, Xiamen University and other units, was successfully launched aboard the Long March 8 carrier rocket. This is China's first lightweight, compact, foldable commercial synthetic aperture radar satellite. Its orbit marks an active and crucial strategic shift for the Tianyi Research Institute, which has been officially made public.

Choosing the SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar) track is not a whim. At that time, the field of optical remote sensing satellites had gradually become crowded, with multiple start-up companies entering, data product homogenization beginning to emerge, and hidden price competition surging.

SAR satellites, by actively emitting microwaves and receiving echoes for imaging, have the ability to observe 24/7, penetrate clouds and even certain vegetation cover. Their unique interferometric measurement (InSAR) technology can better perceive millimeter level subtle deformations on the surface. These characteristics make it irreplaceable in disaster prevention and mitigation (such as flood, earthquake, landslide monitoring), major infrastructure safety (such as bridges, dams, deformation monitoring along high-speed railways), land and resources investigation, and other fields.

This field has a higher technological threshold and few market players, but its potential commercial value is widely recognized as enormous.

Ren Weijia explained its underlying business logic: "Our early positioning was not simply as a satellite manufacturer, but to provide continuous data services through operating constellations. In the early days of our entrepreneurship, we had a metaphor, 'We don't sell knives, we sell services.' Building satellites is a means rather than an end in itself

The path envisioned by Tianyi Research Institute is to master the low-cost satellite manufacturing capability through independent research and development, and based on this, build a large-scale constellation, ultimately relying on the constellation to provide sustainable commercial data and solution services to the ground. SAR? It is precisely the high-value differentiated 'service carrier' they have chosen for this long-term strategy.

This transformation decision has undergone in-depth internal argumentation and cautious promotion. Ren Weijia summarized it as "long-term planning, step-by-step verification, and iterative promotion".

As early as 2019, the Tianyi Research Institute initiated the development of SAR satellites. Unlike some radical constellation plans that require rapid deployment of hundreds or thousands of satellites, the Tianyi Research Institute has adopted an extremely cautious pace.

After the launch of "Hai Si Yi", they continued to iterate the launch of SAR satellites at a rate of about one per year. Each new star carries clear technological upgrade goals and commercial exploration tasks. For example, the launch of "Chaohu-1" in 2022 focused on verifying the operational service capabilities of domestically produced commercial SAR satellites; In 2024, the "Fucheng-1" and "Shenqi" successfully broke through the double star heavy orbit interferometric imaging technology, significantly shortening the revisit period.

'Bet' means putting the company's main research and development resources, strategic focus, and capital story on this track. It requires great determination, especially when stories of industry hype and chasing scale are flying around.

The strategy of Tianyi Research Institute is to ensure that every satellite can generate clear commercial validation value or technological iteration value after being launched, so as to gradually build the full chain capability in the SAR field from satellite platforms, radar payloads to data processing algorithms. This kind of 'slow' is precisely for the sake of running 'fast and stable' in the future.

Financing Adventure

The financing process of Tianyi Research Institute is almost synchronized with the changes in the attitude of Chinese commercial aerospace capital in the past nine years. From paying for the "space dream" and team background in the early days, to later persistently pursuing the uniqueness of the technological path and the feasibility of the commercial closed loop, the rationality and pickiness of capital have been increasing year by year.

At the beginning of the establishment of Tianyi Research Institute, thanks to the founding team's "national team" halo and the story of "the first private aerospace star", its angel round financing relatively smoothly obtained tens of millions of yuan, solving the survival problem from scratch.

The subsequent A and B rounds of financing by Tianyi Research Institute, accompanied by the launch of multiple satellites and the development of the "Maritime Silk Road One", marked the evolution of the story from "being able to launch" to "being able to do something unique". The story of SAR, a differentiated track, is beginning to attract venture capital firms that are not satisfied with the red ocean market of optical remote sensing.

The real capital divergence occurred after 2020.

With the successful insertion of the "Maritime Silk Road One" into orbit and the acquisition of the first batch of high-quality images, Tianyi Research Institute has successively completed important financing such as Series C. The gaze of capital has become unprecedentedly pragmatic.

Ren Weijia deeply felt this - different types of capital bring differentiated resources. Junlian Capital and other market-oriented venture capitalists help Tianyi Research Institute connect with a rich industry ecosystem and partner network, assisting in market development and business model iteration; Government industry funds, such as those in Mianyang and Wuxi, provide valuable support for localized application scenarios and industrial policy coordination, helping to accelerate the implementation and demonstration of technology.

The diversification of capital structure reflects the need for Tianyi Research Institute's business model. Commercial aerospace is a typical long cycle, high-risk, heavy asset track, which may take ten years or even longer from technology accumulation, product iteration to market education.

Therefore, Ren Weijia repeatedly emphasized that this industry particularly needs the companionship of "patient capital". The profit model described by Tianyi Research Institute is a carefully designed three-layer structure: the bottom layer provides basic services for standardized SAR data products, forming stable cash flow; Middle level is a customized solution for vertical industries such as infrastructure security and emergency management, which is the main engine for revenue growth; At the top level, value-added services such as operation and maintenance, early warning, and trend analysis are based on long-term data accumulation, aiming to form a high level of customer stickiness. The core of this model is to move away from simple hardware or raw data sales and shift towards providing high value-added services for deeply integrated industry applications.

In order to prove the feasibility of this model to the capital market, Tianyi Research Institute launched a series of strength demonstrations in the open market - to achieve stable and operational operation of domestic commercial SAR satellites in 2022; In 2023, stable interference of commercial SAR satellites will be achieved for the first time globally; In 2024, breakthroughs will be made in the key technology of binary star interference imaging; Especially with the successful launch of "One Rocket, Six Satellites" in July 2025, it not only set a record for the number of single launches of commercial satellites in China at that time, but also showcased the leap in the mass development, testing, and deployment capabilities of its satellite platform to the outside world. In December of the same year, the name of Tianyi Research Institute was officially changed from "Changsha Tianyi Space Technology Research Institute Co., Ltd." to "Tianyi Space Technology Co., Ltd.", which is widely interpreted by the industry as a key step in its integration with the capital market and seeking listing.

These technological breakthroughs and operational events with milestone significance continue to inject new confidence into the capital story of Tianyi Research Institute. They attempt to prove that the Tianyi Research Institute not only has the ability to send satellites into space with higher efficiency, but also has the ability to continuously, stably, and with high quality generate data from these in orbit assets, and steadily move towards the vision of a solution service provider.

The achievement of sending 38 satellites into space by September 2025 is a hard core asset that supports the valuation of the Tianyi Research Institute.

However, what capital ultimately cares about is still the speed and scale at which these assets are converted into profits. Tianyi Research Institute has won the temporary trust of capital, but the pressure of the next profit "exam" has arrived.

The dilemma of profit model

Currently, the commercial aerospace industry environment in China presents a complex and intertwined trend.

On the one hand, the top-level design of the country continues to release strong benefits, and commercial aerospace has been clearly included in the category of "new quality productivity". Local government support policies and industry funds are pouring in. The steady progress of national low orbit constellation plans such as "China Star Network" objectively drives the upstream supply chain and is expected to dilute launch costs in the future. On the other hand, the industry's "coming of age ceremony" exam question is also in front of us, how to achieve large-scale self financing?

The difficulty of profitability lies first in the depth and speed of market applications.

Although SAR data is widely recognized for its high value, its commercialization process is more complex than expected. The market size of domestic SAR data services is still in its early stages.

A spokesperson from a central aerospace company told the Economic Observer that institutional users, especially government departments and large state-owned enterprises, have long procurement processes, complex budget approvals, and cautious decision-making chains. Deeply embedding data products into the core business processes of the industry and enabling customers to form normalized purchasing habits requires significant market education, ecological construction, and time costs.

Ren Weijia admitted that the biggest uncertainty currently lies in the depth and speed of market applications. The risk lies in whether the enterprise can embed solutions into industry processes faster than the market. This requires companies to not only understand technology, but also have a deep understanding of industry knowledge and strong service integration and sales capabilities.

Secondly, trapped in the heaviness of the business model itself.

Building and operating a SAR constellation requires astronomical upfront capital expenditures. The design lifespan of satellites is limited (usually 5-8 years), which means that even after in orbit operation, the Astronomical Observatory must continue to invest in constellation updates and supplements, forming a cycle of "input, output, and reinvestment". Before market demand fully erupts and unit data service revenue fails to cover depreciation and operating costs, losses on the company's financial statements will be the norm. How to balance the scissors gap between huge capital expenditures and incremental revenue growth is a common challenge faced by all companies operating under the heavy asset management constellation.

Furthermore, trapped in the rapid evolution of the competitive landscape.

On the track, in addition to a group of private companies, some state-owned aerospace groups have also established more market-oriented entities to participate in competition; Outside the race track, the competitive relationship with giants is subtle.

Ren Weijia describes the positioning of Tianyi Research Institute as "independent and deep cultivation, open collaboration", which means building an independent value loop in the SAR professional field, while not excluding cooperation with large constellation operators or industry integrators to become a professional data provider in its ecosystem. But the value distribution and discourse power game in this cooperation will be a long-term business issue.

For Tianyi Research Institute, vertically cultivating the SAR track requires facing the objective laws of specific tracks: its advantage lies in the ability to gather resources and establish deep barriers, while the risk lies in the relatively limited width of the track. If the downstream application market does not explode as expected, the company will face growth pressure. The gradual path adopted by Tianyi Research Institute ensures the robustness of each step, but also tests its ability to grasp the market window period.

Looking at the entire commercial aerospace industry, the game of profit models goes far beyond this. For example, how to reconcile the contradiction between mass production capability and customized demand? Is the pricing power of data services in the hands of satellite operators or will it be dominated by downstream application platforms? Will geopolitical factors become more insurmountable barriers than technology in the international market?

The record breaking launch of "one rocket, six stars" in September 2025 symbolizes that the large-scale capabilities of the Tianyi Research Institute are ready. But the successful launch is just the beginning. How to transform these expensive assets in orbit into sustained, scalable, and predictable revenue and profits is a more arduous and essential task facing the company.

From scientific research to SAR constellation operation, the nine years of the Tianyi Research Institute have condensed an extreme test on commercial feasibility. The choice of its path and the challenges it faces have become a test for observing whether China's commercial aerospace industry can fulfill its early commitments. What the market ultimately expects is no longer a story about the stars, but tangible financial statements that can cross cycles. This long battle for profitability has just entered the most critical deep-water zone.