An Origin Story: The 10 Years that Led SWISSto12 CEO Emile de Rijk to Becoming Satellite Executive of the Year

It was only a decade ago at SATELLITE 2015 where the new CEO of a brash new startup SWISSto12 walked around the conference with a small 3D printed antenna and big dreams of making a difference in the satellite sector. Fast-forward 10 years, CEO Emile de Rijk is the 2024 Satellite Executive of the Year winner in a full circle moment for the company's ascent.

What makes SWISSto12 so special? The satellite manufacturing space has long been the domain of some of the most storied and biggest companies in our sector. Yet, within the space of 10 years, SWISSto12 has come in and shaken this market, winning significant contracts with the likes of Inmarsat (now Viasat) and Intelsat and showing the impact an upstart can make in this market.

SWISSto12 is now one of Europe's foremost space tech companies, and in many ways, a poster child for the European space industry, with a comprehensive technology roadmap that goes beyond manufacturing satellites. The company’s rise from obscurity into the mainstream is an example of what can be achieved if you can bring the right technology at the right time to fill market needs.

In this interview, de Rijk talks about the origins behind SWISSto12 and how the company looks to be even more of a presence over the next 10 years.

VIA SATELLITE: What does it mean for you personally to win Satellite Executive of the Year for 2024?

De Rijk: It is a great pleasure and something to be proud of because it’s a recognition of a decade of hard work for the entire SWISSto12 team. It took a lot of resilience to get where we are today — to start off as a new company in the space industry with only a handful of people a decade ago, to focus the applications of our core innovation to the satcoms market, and then to commercialize it at scale. So, it has been a real adventure. We had to incrementally get acquainted with the industry and understand who does what, what are the problems that are of importance to address and try to anticipate the needs of customers. In parallel with that, build technology, followed by products and then build systems to ultimately reach the position we are now in, which is furnishing entire GEO [Geostationary Orbit] satellites and ground products to connect the satellites. This is not something that gets invented in one day. There is a lot of learning, onboarding the right people in the team, listening to customers and it is very exciting to see that work get rewarded by the Via Satellite Executive of the Year award.

VIA SATELLITE: Let’s go back to the start. When did you originally conceive of the idea for SWISSto12? What was your initial vision for the company?

De Rijk: It happened somewhat by accident. I was doing a PhD in physics and I had to build an experimental advanced magnetic resonance imaging scanner. That work involved building radio frequency and microwave equipment and systems, but my PhD was relatively short on budget to buy the expensive radio frequency equipment necessary. I realized I could use all of the manufacturing labs and infrastructure from the university at will to build things myself and that led to the first functional 3D printed antennas for radio frequency applications. With that innovation proven, we had initial customers that approached us from this scientific instrumentation sector. That really kicked off the company in 2011.

But, to be honest, we were initially a ‘solution looking for a problem,’ so, we spent some time probing different industries and figuring out which industries would benefit from all the advantages of our proprietary 3D printing for radio frequency antennas and identifying which industry has the right size of addressable market, where it can offer the most value for customers.

We reached the conclusion our ideal market was satellite communications. I remember my first SATELLITE conference. In 2015, there I was with a little 3D printed antenna in my blazer jacket product, walking the trade show floor for the first time, trying to figure out who does what, how this industry works. The SWISSto12 story very rapidly evolved from there.

VIA SATELLITE: The satellite manufacturing space is not an easy way to break into. Some of the biggest companies in satellite have huge legacies in this area whether it’s Boeing, Thales, Airbus among others. Why did you think you could come in and disturb the status quo?

De Rijk: It is the accumulation of a number of factors and also timing. One of the factors is having a strong core technology. We managed to build a core RF antenna and product portfolio based on our proprietary additive manufacturing technology because it is really disruptive in building products that offer superior performance, smaller form factor, lower weight — all the good stuff you need when building a high performing, compact payload. That came in addition to a lot of dialogue with the satellite operators to understand their problems, their plans, their difficulties, what they could buy, what they could not buy in the market, based on the offerings of the incumbent manufacturers.

In those conversations, we realized a number of things. First of all, we were in the midst of a transition from broadcast to broadband business models. Operators had less long term visibility on where their revenues were going to come from. Revenues now come from a more fragmented base of customers and regions. While the overall demand is increasing, the more fragmented, shorter term nature of their revenue visibility incentivizes them to drive towards smaller, more incremental capital expenditure decisions.

If you couple of this with the emergence of LEO constellations like Starlink and Kuiper – which challenge operators’ business models in the direct-to-home broadband segment – there is an ever increasing need for targeted business cases that differentiate from these LEO constellations and grow in areas that are more defensible and differentiated commercially. This points towards the need for operators to make more incremental and targeted cap-ex decisions – something our SmallSat HummingSat enabled for the first time in the Geostationary market.

So, all of this combined at SWISSto12 into a simple mission statement; how can we build a fraction of a satellite at a fraction of the cost whilst preserving value for money, whether that’s cost per transponder or cost of capacity or other metrics for these customer business cases. Listening to customers and reading the market dynamics was one of the most important factors in SWISSto12’s success, then recruiting the right team. We had to make a careful choice of recruiting people with a lot of experience and credibility in this industry to execute such a program, but also have the right mindsets to challenge some of the established ways of working, rules and requirements, but in a smart and justified way.

Finally, we have a ‘make’ and ‘buy’ strategy, where we focus our efforts on what we are good at – payload innovation, rate of frequency product innovation and architecting the right satellite in the right system – but then choose to work with reliable, established suppliers for different units and sub-systems that can leverage existing flight heritage qualification and maturity.

Finding the right mix of all of these parameters to address the requirements of a customer who wants to try something new, but doesn’t want to take an excessive amount of risk in doing so, has allowed us to reach the position we are in today. We are hugely grateful to the European Space Agency (ESA) who were early supporters and sponsors of this approach. They brought financial and technical support to the table. Their support enabled us to deliver the last mile of commercial reassurance which helped us to convince our anchor customer – Intelsat – to move forward with the very first HummingSat order, and then subsequently Inmarsat.

VIA SATELLITE: Do you believe it is harder for a European startup like SWISSto12 to succeed compared to a U.S.-based company?

De Rijk: Certain things are harder, certain things are easier. To start with, in terms of what is harder, there is just less funding available in Europe. If you look at how much money you can raise from an investor community for a project in the space industry, you will typically find there is three to 10 times less money in Europe from venture capital or other sources of dilutive funding, which has pushed us to make really efficient use of capital throughout our journey.

The big advantage we have is ESA. They have been an excellent partner since the early days of developing Radio Frequency products, prior to our decision to develop satellites. They have a great model of co-funding product development and not just bringing money, but an expert team of collaborative engineers and program managers to help you execute and when you’re an emerging player with a novel technology, that makes a difference.

In general, you could say the U.S. market in general is more inward-looking. A lot of the U.S. players in our sector are focused on U.S. end-customer programs and, in particular, Department of Defense programs. From a European perspective, we have the ability to be versatile and address a strong home market, U.S. and non-U.S. opportunities, which I believe is an advantage.

VIA SATELLITE: You won some significant contracts with the likes of Intelsat and Inmarsat (Viasat). Did you win these contracts ahead of schedule?

De Rijk: The timing was right. We had the right product at the right moment and you need a contract to execute well. The earlier you can create a contractual relationship to drive a product to market with a customer injecting their requirements and their needs and guiding you through this development, the better. You are then able to focus your efforts efficiently on what is needed by the customer and not be distracted by open ended options.

VIA SATELLITE: Did the satellite world need a product like HummingSat?

De Rijk: I think the market has made strong statements about the need for HummingSat, particularly in the last year. But, in the early days when we were developing it, market awareness of the challenges faced and the requirements of a solution was not mature. Developing the right solution was really a result of our willingness to listen to customer feedback, expressing their required roadmap, understand what is working and what is not working, what are their problems, their projections etc. We derived HummingSat from that process of engagement.

Our innovation was an anticipation of the customer requirements and being pro-active about proposing solutions that trigger reactions and responses from the market, and then continually adapting along the way to refine the offering and get to something that really meets the market need.

The GEO market needed this approach. There is a somewhat contradictory situation where the overall demand for connectivity from space is strongly increasing year-on-year, where the unit economics of satellites in GEO remains strong and can be materially proven in terms of what does it mean to cost a Mbps in space in GEO, what does it cost to put a transponder in GEO. However, this has not correlated with the number of orders of large, legacy GEO assets which have declined over the last decade before stabilising. Before we entered the market, there was a degree of market pessimism about GEO.

In my opinion, there is a relatively stable market long term for large GEO satellites, but there is also a huge growth opportunity in GEO that this new class of smallsats can unlock. That growth is materializing around regional business cases; smaller, targeted services that can differentiate from what constellations can offer and provide competitive unit economics. You also have replacements from aging broadcasting satellites that can be no longer profitable in terms of unit economics if you do it with big spacecraft, but are compelling if you address it with a smallsat. Then there is secure sovereign connectivity which is a major focus for a lot of countries and nation states who want to acquire their own connectivity solution in space, and where using small GEO satellites is the key to affordable sovereignty.

Many countries don’t need a gigantic amount of capacity that a large GEO satellite would furnish. Instead, they want to move ahead building capacity incrementally. Even some of the bigger Space-faring nations want to spread their risk. Rather than investing solely in large GEO satellites, they want to also acquire some constellations of smaller satellites in GEO to disaggregate the investment, reduce the overall risk, and have more assets in space to move around. It’s a dynamic market, and the agility of HummingSat as an asset plays well into this.

VIA SATELLITE: Do you believe there has been a lack of innovation in satellite manufacturing/satellite technology?

De Rijk: Yes and no. If you look at all of the satellite manufacturers out there, everybody has been doing R&D continuously so we can’t say there has been a lack of innovation. There has been tremendous amounts of funding injected into improving satellites from one to the next.

That can have some negative consequences because serial products in the large GEO class have been replicated multiple times over many years to drive economies of scale. There has been significant innovation recently with software-defined satellites, thanks to a huge push from the satellite manufacturers to really innovate across the board, from every unit within the satellite system, to the entire way payloads are built. I think the impact of this has been somewhat underestimated by the market today. It creates the ability to have satellites that are more alike from one to the next so there is a very high level of versatility. But, these remain large satellites with relatively large CapEx figures and they cannot address every opportunity. The smaller GEO satellites can fill the gaps left unaddressed by these large GEO satellites.

This all points to a market with complementary offerings. I don’t think the satellite industry has lacked innovation, just look at what has happened with LEO constellations. But, innovation must be targeted in the right places, and innovation alone isn’t enough – businesses need to be built from innovation. This is the real crux of it.

VIA SATELLITE: What interests me is how diverse the company is. It is more than just a satellite manufacturer. Your deal with SES in February was particularly interesting where you are developing next generation ESAs. How did this deal come about?

De Rijk: It comes from our core USP in technology which is 3D printing for radio frequency antennas and products. We have more than 1,000 SWISSto12 RF products in orbit currently. We have applied our core innovation to perfecting and optimizing satellite payloads but, correspondingly, the market needs ground terminals on the other side of the equation.

There is a lot we can do in terms of building electronically scanned antennas and user terminals and with our technology to replace the whole radiating antenna layer of these antenna systems to drive substantial performance improvements for similar types of architectures. These advantages can be leveraged to either improve link budgets on systems on certain platforms or maintain similar performance to legacy solutions but reduce the footprints of the antennas by roughly a factor of two. You can also use our core technology to reduce the bill of materials of electronically scanned antennas by roughly a factor of two.

A significant USP we have in this market is the ability to offer cost-reduction related to these technical benefits across multiple frequency bands and platforms. Our focus is mainly across three bands – C/Ka/Ku ESAs, and working to populate different variants of antennas for different types of applications and platforms to mount them upon. That is a huge market opportunity for SWISSto12 and even offers the possibility to close link budgets between our user terminals and our HummingSat satellites. The ultimate vision is to bring turnkey solutions to customers.

VIA SATELLITE: What is your ultimate vision for SWISSto12? How big do you think the company could get over the next five to 10 years?

De Rijk: We still have a lot of work to do. We have delivered a few thousand products in space, but we haven’t yet flown our full satellite. That will be a big milestone in 2027 to get the first satellite into orbit and then the subsequent ones scheduled for launch. We see a tremendous demand in the market for HummingSat. So, it is going to be an execution-focused play from now on to scale our ability to deliver satellites faster at a higher pace, and in greater numbers, to meet the requirements from customers in the market.

On the other side, it is also an execution play in the ground segment, as we roll out the various user terminals across the various bands that we are developing. Our first HummingLink, which we released earlier this year, is a satcom-on-the-pause user terminal. Ultimately, we’re demonstrating value across these two segments of the market – space and ground — both independently and also on a combined basis. We are focused on working with satellite operators and nation states to bring as much performance and cost benefits to their end customers and use cases so we can continue to be relevant and help shape this marketplace.

VIA SATELLITE: What does the company’s technology roadmap look like?

De Rijk: There is going to be a lot of focus on secure sovereign communications. That is a really important market segment for us where our products have a lot of relevance. It lends itself well to deployments using small GEO satellites, but also high-performance UTs for various platforms. The more we can optimize both sides of that equation, the more value we can show to these customers, and the more we can converge to not just selling ground antennas or just selling satellites, but providing a turnkey solution that customers can invest in and operate successfully.

VIA SATELLITE: The company is growing at an impressive clip. Revenues are increasing. You are increasing the workforce. What does the next chapter of the story look like for SWISSto12?

De Rijk: We are significantly expanding our facilities. Our team is growing every month. That is something that is going to continue for the foreseeable future to meet the needs and demands of our customers and execute our programs successfully. We have expanded geographically with multiple sites and presences in Europe, scaling our presence in the U.S. and this is driving growth as we go.

VIA SATELLITE: You have won Satellite Exec of the Year. The company is regularly listed as one of Europe’s top tech startups. Do you feel a sense of pressure almost in the sense that SWISSto12 is one of the poster children for the European space industry?

De Rijk: Of course, there is pressure, but we have no choice but to succeed. We need to focus on delivering and working really hard, remaining focused on addressing our customer requirements and meeting their needs. We are continuing to scale the team by bringing onboard smart, proactive people with the right skills and experience to make it happen. That is super important to a project like ours. It is terrific fun to do this work so the pressure is all positive. VS