SWISSto12 CEO Emile de Rijk and Slingshot’s Agatha AI Win 2024 Exec and Tech of the Year Awards
March 12th, 2025
SWISSto12 CEO Emile de Rijk and Slingshot Aerospace’s Agatha AI product won the 2024 Satellite Executive and Technology of the Year awards, Via Satellite announced Wednesday. Winners were chosen by a combination of public vote and the Via Satellite editorial board.
In addition, Dr. Femi Ishola, founder and CEO of Phemotron Systems won the 2025 Startup Space pitch competition, chosen by a panel of judges.
De Rijk has disrupted the satellite manufacturing market with the HummingSat small Geostationary (GEO) satellite platform, winning orders from major operators Inmarsat (now part of Viasat) and Intelsat. In 2024, SWISSto12 completed preliminary design reviews on the HummingSat program while growing revenues by over 40 percent. SWISSto12 uses proprietary 3D-printing technology and has more than 1,000 flight-proven radio frequency (RF) products already in orbit.
In his acceptance speech, de Rijk recalled attending SATELLITE for the first time 10 years ago when SWISSto12 was a three-person startup, and spoke about the full-circle nature of the moment.
“I remember walking into the exhibit hall with a piece of 3D printed antenna, which was our initial product, and thinking ‘I know absolutely nobody in this industry,’” de Rijk said. “10 years later, here we are building GEO satellites for some of the most prestigious customers in the industry and have put products into space and developed ground products to better connect various platforms and users to satellites.”
De Rijk was a competitor in the inaugural Startup Space competition in 2017.
“I want to encourage all the entrepreneurs in this room,” he added. “One day you can walk in here and be nobody and get to know your first contact in the space industry and achieve something meaningful that moves the line for everybody.”
Technology of the Year winner Agatha AI is a system designed to pinpoint even the most subtle spacecraft abnormalities and predict future threats. Developed in partnership with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Agatha is a unique AI application in the way it evaluates data from thousands of satellites and provides space domain awareness and insights into potential bad actors.
Slingshot Aerospace CEO Tim Solms accepted the Technology of the Year award.
“This is an incredible recognition for a group of developers who worked hand-in-hand with DARPA years ago to come up with this groundbreaking technology,” Solms said. “Agatha identifies anomalies in constellations to give us a first-mover advantage for either anomalous activity or nefarious activity. For a guy who hasn't written a single line of code, I'm incredibly grateful to the teams who developed this.”
Startup Space winner Phemotron Systems, led by Ishola, is a multinational space company with operations in Nigeria, Japan, and the U.S. It is developing and aiming to launch a 12U small satellite cubesat platform called the AI-MotherBox-1, which is equipped with a high-performing AI engine that can execute data gathering tasks at higher speeds than conventional cubesats.
SATELLITE Executive Chair Jeffrey Hill said this was the most competitive Startup Space in the event's history. "Dr. Femi Ishola delivered a fantastic pitch that highlighted how Phemotron Systems’ cubesat could potentially utilize existing ground infrastructure in Africa to distribute analytics and critical data to a wide variety of customers," Hill commented.
CEO and Founder Ishola is the first Startup Space winner from Africa.
“Thank you so much for this opportunity. I dedicate this award to the African children with dreams, with hopes. This is a testament that you can do it,” Ishola said. VS