There’s a comforting story we tell about the Age of European Exploration. A king or queen, draped in ermine and ambition, looks at a map, taps a finger on some blank ocean, and says “conquer that” — and off sail the ships, funded by royal treasuries, flying the flag, bringing back glory for crown and country.
It’s a great story. And also, not true.
The Age of European Exploration — the one that redrew the map, moved more silver than the world had ever seen, and eventually made “globalization” a word we’d need — was not primarily a state enterprise. It was a private enterprise wearing a state’s clothing. Kings supplied the branding, the legal cover, and occasionally a strongly worded letter of introduction. Private individuals, syndicates, merchant families, and one extremely well-armed religious order supplied the money, took the risk, and — when things went well — kept most of the upside.
This is not a minor historical footnote. It’s the actual operating model. And if you’re the kind of person who thinks a lot about who funds frontiers, it’s worth understanding exactly how each of the four great seafaring powers pulled this off — because we may be about to watch the whole show run again, this time pointed up into the sky, instead of out into the sea.
Spain: The Original SPV
Everyone remembers that Queen Isabella backed Columbus. Almost nobody remembers that she basically got talked into it by her accountant.
The man who actually made the first voyage happen was Luis de Santángel, a Crown financial official who advanced roughly 1.14 million maravedís of his own money and credit to get three ships in the water — money the Crown paid back only after the fact, once it was clear the bet had worked. Santángel also leaned on Genoese and Florentine banking houses in Seville, because 15th-century Spain, like 21st-century Silicon Valley, ran on other people’s capital and other people’s confidence. Columbus himself was offered a co-investment slot: under the Capitulations of Santa Fe, he could put in one-eighth of the cost for one-eighth of the profits. Founder equity, basically, four centuries early.
Once the model was proven, Spain scaled it with a structure so clean it could go straight into a fund deck today. The Crown issued a capitulación — a license granting a conquistador the legal right to conquer and govern a given territory. The conquistador then had to fund the entire expedition himself: ships, men, weapons, food, the works. Usually this meant striking a deal with wealthy backers, including the Catholic Church, which had both capital and an excellent risk appetite for civilizing missions. If the expedition failed, the investors lose their investment, but the conquistador was simply, catastrophically bankrupt. The Crown lost nothing.
If it succeeded, the Crown took the quinto real — a flat 20% off the top of whatever came back. No capex, no operating risk, just a permanent carry position on other people’s expeditions. Cortés and Pizarro both bankrolled their own campaigns using fortunes they’d already made in the Caribbean, then recycled the proceeds of conquest into the next one, which is either “aggressive reinvestment strategy” or “founder doing a Series B off Series A traction,”.
Spain, in other words, ran the Age of Exploration as a portfolio of privately funded, individually licensed special purpose vehicles, with the state collecting a royalty and taking zero balance-sheet risk. Pretty shrewd of Her Royal Highness Queen Isabella.
Portugal: When Your Lead Investor Is Also a Monk With a Sword
Portugal did it differently, and frankly, more dramatically, because Portugal’s chief financial backer for exploration was a militarized religious order with its own castle.
When the Pope disbanded the Knights Templar in 1312 — a genuinely bad year for Templars everywhere — Portugal’s King Dinis I did something clever instead of confiscating everything: he negotiated a rebrand. The Templars’ assets, membership, and fortress at Tomar were repackaged in 1319 as the Order of Christ, a new military-religious order that inherited essentially the entire Templar balance sheet without the Templar baggage.
A century later, that balance sheet found its most famous administrator: Henry the Navigator, who governed the Order of Christ from 1420 until his death in 1460, and used its revenues — tithes, estates, trade income — to fund the systematic Portuguese push down the African coast. Every caravel that left Sagres under Henry’s sponsorship sailed under the Order’s red cross, painted directly onto the sail. The Order of Christ was, functionally, a sovereign wealth fund with a chapel attached, and the cross on the sail was its logo, visible from any ship or shore for miles — the 15th-century equivalent of a portfolio company slapping the lead investor’s logo on the pitch deck.
The Order kept funding Portuguese exploration for generations. Vasco da Gama, notably, did not sail to India under the Order of Christ’s banner — he was a knight of the rival Order of Santiago at the time, and only switched allegiance to the Order of Christ in 1507, in what amounted to a very medieval LP dispute over a piece of real estate. But the broader pattern holds: Portugal’s expansion was substantially financed not by the royal treasury directly, but by a quasi-independent, revenue-generating religious-military institution that the king happened to also run.
England: The Queen’s Very Secret Seed Round
If Spain ran licensed SPVs and Portugal ran a religious family office, England ran something that looks uncomfortably like an angel syndicate laundering itself through the state.
Take Francis Drake’s 1577 circumnavigation — history remembers it as an epic feat of seamanship and a masterstroke against Spanish naval dominance. It was also, structurally, a £5,000 seed round. Elizabeth I personally put in £1,000 — about a fifth of the total — and did so covertly, because openly bankrolling an attack on Spanish shipping would have counted as an act of war England wasn’t ready to admit to. Alongside her, a syndicate of the most powerful people at court quietly wrote checks: Robert Dudley, Christopher Hatton, the Earl of Lincoln (who happened to be Lord High Admiral, which is a genuinely excellent board seat to have), Francis Walsingham, and John Hawkins. Officially, the voyage was billed as an exploration mission in search of new trade routes. Unofficially, everyone involved knew it was a raid on the Spanish Pacific, dressed up in exploration’s clothing because that’s what the paperwork required.
The return was, even by today’s venture standards, obscene. Drake’s backers reportedly received about £47 back for every £1 invested — a 4,600% return, delivered in stolen Spanish silver, gold, and jewels, in under three years. Elizabeth’s share alone was said to be enough to pay off England’s foreign debt and seed an entirely new venture, the Levant Company. Drake, for his trouble, got knighted on the deck of his own ship — the 16th-century version of ringing the opening bell.
This was not a one-off. English maritime expansion ran heavily on this exact playbook: nobility and merchants forming joint-venture syndicates to fund privateering and colonizing voyages, with the Crown as a discreet, deniable, occasionally-controlling-interest investor. It’s telling that many of the men actually leading these ventures — Drake, Walter Raleigh, Humphrey Gilbert — were second sons of noble families, cut out of inheritance by English primogeniture and therefore highly motivated to go make their own fortune at sea. English exploration was, in no small part, powered by ambitious younger siblings with something to prove and rich friends willing to bet on them. Some things never change.
The Netherlands: The Company That Filed Its Own IPO Before Anyone Knew What That Was
And then there’s the VOC, which didn’t bother hiding the private-capital part at all — it just invented the mechanism for doing it at scale, in public, forever.
In August 1602, the newly formed Dutch East India Company did something no company on Earth had ever done: it sold shares to the general public. Not to a handful of court insiders, not to a cabal of Genoese bankers — to anyone in Amsterdam with money and appetite. 1,143 investors bought in through the Amsterdam chamber alone, and across all six regional chambers, the company raised roughly 6.4 million guilders — an amount so large for the time that historians still argue about the modern equivalent, with estimates in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Article 10 of the company’s charter explicitly permitted this. It also, almost as an afterthought, permitted those shares to be traded — and so the merchants of Amsterdam started buying and selling VOC paper on a bridge and in a chapel, because nobody had built an exchange yet and the merchants weren’t going to wait around for one. They built the world’s first stock market by accident, standing on a bridge, because their startup needed a secondary market and nobody had told them that wasn’t a thing yet.
The Dutch state’s contribution was, again, almost entirely regulatory: a 21-year charter granting the VOC a trade monopoly in Asia. In exchange for that piece of paper, the VOC got something no purely private company has ever legally held before or since — the explicit right to wage war, negotiate treaties, coin money, and govern territory, all as a for-profit corporate entity accountable to shareholders, not the crown. The VOC wasn’t a company with government backing. It was a company that was, for practical purposes, occasionally the government, in whichever port it happened to be standing in.
Genuinely: a joint-stock company, funded by the Amsterdam public, running its own navy and foreign policy. If a modern tech founder pitched that to a regulator, they’d be laughed out of the building. In 1602, it was just called Tuesday.
The Pattern
Strip away the flags and the four countries collapse into one story, told with different props. Spain licensed private capital and took a royalty. Portugal ran its exploration program through a wealthy religious-military institution with its own fortress. England ran covert angel syndicates through the throne itself. The Dutch floated public shares to fund a company that came with its own army.
In every case, the state’s real contribution wasn’t money. It was legal cover — the license, the charter, the flag, the plausible deniability. The actual capital, the actual risk-bearing, and by extension the actual ownership of what got built, sat with private individuals, syndicates, and institutions chasing a return. The crowns were regulators and brand. The money — and eventually a great deal of the power — belonged to whoever wrote the check.
So Who’s Going to Fund the Solar System?
Which brings us, inevitably, to the only frontier left that still requires ships.
The instinctive assumption about the space economy is the same instinctive assumption people had about the 15th century: that it’ll be run by nation-states, because nation-states are the ones with the flags and the launch pads and the astronauts saluting on television. NASA. Roscosmos. CNSA. Big flags, big budgets, big parades.
But watch where the actual capital and the actual risk-taking already sit, and the pattern from five hundred years ago is reassembling itself in real time, just with different costumes.
Private capital, licensed by the state, taking the actual equity risk — that’s already the dominant model. Launch vehicles, satellite constellations, lunar landers: these are now increasingly built by privately funded companies operating under government license and for government customers, with the state acting as regulator and the biggest. This is the Spanish model, almost exactly: the state issues the license (launch approval, spectrum rights, orbital slots), takes its cut (contracts, taxes, national-security veto rights), and the private capital keeps the equity and the upside. Somewhere, a 15th-century Genoese banker is nodding approvingly.
A corporation that quietly starts doing things only governments used to do — flying operational payloads for national defense, running the communications infrastructure entire militaries now depend on, effectively becoming an instrument of foreign policy while still technically being a company with a stock ticker and a shareholder base to please. Is that you, SPACEX?
And the warrior-monks? Every frontier eventually produces an institution that’s part ideology, part capital pool, with a mission bigger than quarterly returns — believers with a balance sheet, funding the frontier because they think it’s civilizationally necessary. The Order of Christ funded fifty years of exploration and colonization of the African coastline because Henry the Navigator genuinely believed it mattered, not because his LPs were demanding a return by Friday. Today, they are the visionary individuals who control large pools of capital who sincerely believe that the fate and destiny of the human race is in the stars.
The one actor conspicuously not on this list, in any of the four historical cases or their modern echoes, is the state writing the check itself and keeping the equity. That was never really the model. It only looked like the model, because the flag was the only part flying high enough to see from shore.
Vicente Diño is the writer and publisher behind Galleon Space — a newsletter covering the space economy in Southeast Asia and Latin America | @GalleonSpace