Lausanne-based SWISSto12 secures €73 million to develop its compact satellite HummingSat ahead of planned 2027 launch
SWISSto12, a Lausanne-based aerospace company and manufacturer of satellite systems and radio frequency (RF) products, today announced that it has secured €73 million ($84.8 million) in financial support from European Space Agency (ESA) member states through the HummingSat ARTES partnership project.
The fresh capital will be used to accelerate the development and industrialisation of HummingSat, its “small yet powerful” geostationary telecommunications satellite developed in collaboration with the European Space Agency (ESA) through its public-private-partnership programme. It will also be used for scaling up its manufacturing capacity and boosting new product innovations.
The additional ESA funding, through the Advanced Research in Telecommunications Systems (ARTES) HummingSat Partnership Project, within ESA Connectivity and Secure Communications, was backed at the 2025 ministerial conference by pledges from member states Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Sweden, Norway, and associate member Canada.
In addition to this, the company has also secured funding from European private investors in the second half of 2025, bringing its total funding raised to more than €100 million.
Emile de Rijk, CEO and Founder of SWISSto12, said, “The recent subscriptions of Member States and Cooperating States at the ESA Ministerial Council to the HummingSat Project, and the latest round of funding from European private investors sends a strong message to the global market that SWISSto12 is at the heart of satellite communications innovation.
“With our growing suite of agile, cost-effective and highly performant SatCom solutions, we provide a credible answer to some of the most pressing challenges facing the space economy, including the critical issue of enabling satellite sovereignty – something, until now, out of reach for most of the world’s nations.”
Dr Emile de Rijk founded SWISSto12 in 2011 as a spinoff from his PhD at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) in Lausanne. According to the company, its RF components benefit from patented 3D-printing technologies and associated Radio Frequency (RF) product designs that deliver lightweight, compact, highly performing and competitive RF functionality.
Explaining the rationale behind its name, the company states on its website: “Our name blends tradition with technology. ‘Swiss’ represents the tradition of precision craftsmanship that Switzerland is renowned for. ‘to12’ calls on the company’s first products, which were channelling signals at Terahertz frequencies (1 THz = 1012Hz). Putting them together, we get SWISSto12, or ‘Swiss to the power of twelve’.”
The company claims to be accelerating the transition of the global satellite communications industry, away from legacy large, purpose-built, expensive and slow-to-deploy solutions towards smaller, faster, cheaper assets that leverage software-defined, reconfigurable payload architectures and agile, multi-orbit capabilities.
SWISSto12 also plans to use the investment to further develop its phased-array antenna technologies to be used onboard LEO/MEO/GEO satellite payloads and ground products such as user terminals. This will strengthen its ability to serve a broad set of customer needs, for communications from and to geostationary and non-geostationary orbits.
HummingSat is scheduled for its first launch for SES in 2027. According to the company, the HummingSat platform is significantly smaller and more cost-efficient than legacy geostationary satellites, giving customers a flexible, cost-effective platform to expand transponder capacity, enable network flexibility and reconfigurable software-defined payloads, deploy sovereign capabilities, and introduce new services with agility.
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