SWISSto12 Secures €73M From ESA For HummingSat Satellite Project

The new funding will accelerate the development and industrialization of HummingSat, SWISSto12’s “small yet powerful” geostationary telecommunications satellite, created in collaboration with ESA through its public-private partnership program. It will also support scaling manufacturing capacity and driving new product innovations.

The ESA funding, part of the Advanced Research in Telecommunications Systems (ARTES) HummingSat Partnership Project under ESA Connectivity and Secure Communications, was endorsed at the 2025 ministerial conference with pledges from Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Sweden, Norway and associate member Canada.

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Additionally, SWISSto12 secured backing from European private investors in H2 2025, bringing its total funding to over €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 spin-off from his PhD at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) in Lausanne. The company’s RF components leverage patented 3D-printing technologies and innovative designs to deliver lightweight, compact, high-performance, and cost-competitive RF solutions.

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’.”

SWISSto12 aims to accelerate the shift in the satellite communications industry from large, expensive, slow-to-deploy systems to smaller, faster, and more cost-efficient assets that use software-defined, reconfigurable payloads and multi-orbit capabilities.

The company plans to use the funding to advance its phased-array antenna technologies for both LEO, MEO and GEO satellite payloads, as well as ground products like user terminals broadening its ability to meet diverse communications needs across geostationary and non-geostationary orbits.

HummingSat, set for its first launch with SES in 2027, is designed to be significantly smaller and more cost-efficient than traditional GEO satellites, providing a flexible, affordable platform to expand transponder capacity, enable network flexibility, deploy sovereign capabilities and introduce agile, software-defined services.

About SWISSto12

Founded in 2011, SWISSto12 is a leading aerospace company specializing in advanced RF products, satellite payloads, and systems. Its portfolio includes HummingSat, a compact yet powerful geostationary telecommunications satellite, designed for cost-efficient, flexible and high-performance satellite communications, supporting innovative, software-defined, and multi-orbit capabilities.multi-orbit capabilities.