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OTB Ventures celebrated just a month ago the 8th anniversary of our investment into ICEYE.
Eight years is a blink of an eye in space tech industry, but it is long enough to watch an ambitious startup with 50 employees and a very first test satellite in orbit grow into the unquestioned global leader in Synthetic Aperture Radar microsatellite technology, with over 70 launched satellites and more than a 1,000 people across multiple continents, and serving as a strategic intelligence partner to governments and defence organizations worldwide.
It has been, without question, the great privilege to witness firsthand how bold engineering, relentless execution, and visionary leadership can reshape an entire industry.
We have invested in May 2018. It was the 4th investment from our newly established fund (but already 2nd in spacetech), and we were still climbing the steep side of the learning curve on space industry. Yet it became almost instantly clear that we were looking at something rare and a truly one-of-a-kind opportunity defined by three things that, when they appear together, every investor should recognise immediately: an exceptional founding team, technology that was genuinely unprecedented, and a vision of sufficient grandeur to build an enduring global company.
We invested the maximum ticket our fund capacity allowed. We then doubled down in Series C and again in Series D. And the conviction compounded at every step.
The Promise of Always-On Earth Intelligence
So, what drew us in?
The promise was deceptively simple: always-on, 24/7 Earth observation imagery, delivered in near real-time, independent of cloud cover, time of day, or weather conditions of any kind. For decades, access to Earth observation data had been constrained by fundamental limitations of optical sensing - and ICEYE was here to change that.
Synthetic Aperture Radar makes this possible. Unlike optical imaging systems, SAR satellites actively transmit radio waves toward Earth and create images from the reflected signals. Because radio waves penetrate clouds and operate independently of sunlight, they provide reliable imaging day and night, in virtually any weather conditions.
The concept was powerful. The challenge was making it commercially viable.
Reinventing SAR for the New Space Era
SAR satellites were not new. The problem was that traditional systems were the size of a truck, cost between $200 and $300 million to develop, and were so heavy that launch costs alone put them beyond the reach of all but a handful of governments. Full constellations - the kind needed to achieve short revisit times and genuinely timely imagery - were a fantasy for anyone outside a major superpower. The result was a world served by only a few of these behemoths, incapable of delivering Earth observation at the speed or scale that modern decisions demand.
ICEYE changed the unit economics entirely. The company pioneered microsatellite SAR technology, compressing capabilities previously reserved for large government platforms into small, affordable form factors. At the size of a refrigerator, with a cost structure roughly 90-100x lower than legacy systems, a full constellation became commercially viable for the first time in history.
The implications were profound. Instead of a few expensive assets circling the planet, operators could deploy dozens of satellites, dramatically increasing revisit frequency and enabling near real time monitoring of events anywhere on Earth.
This was not an incremental improvement. It was a fundamental shift in how Earth observation could be delivered.
It is all about the journey
The path forward was far from straightforward.
Skeptics argued that high performance SAR systems could not function effectively within the physical constraints of a microsatellite platform. Questions were raised about antenna size, power limitations, atmospheric drag, and whether meaningful image quality could ever be achieved.
The founders responded with engineering. The very first prototype antenna was mounted on an aircraft and tested at altitude. Shortly after, the first test satellites were placed in orbit, making ICEYE the true first mover in the micro-SAR domain. With each successive satellite generation, resolution improved, rapidly closing the gap with large legacy systems. The skeptics went quiet.
ICEYE was founded in 2012 by Rafał Modrzewski and Pekka Laurila, initially as a course project at Aalto University, and spun out as a company in 2015. The name “ICEYE” implies: the company was founded to monitor cracks and navigable passages in Arctic sea ice, enabling safer maritime routing through northern waters. But the technology quickly revealed a far broader theatre of operations. Market pull came from every direction - forest monitoring, natural disaster detection and response, maritime oil spill tracking, agricultural harvest monitoring, illegal fishing prevention.
Then the world changed.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, and the broader fracturing of the post-Cold War security order it represented, created a demand signal unlike anything the commercial space industry had previously encountered.
For decades, allied nations had relied on shared intelligence frameworks and US-led infrastructure. That model had always carried fragility at its core; the war in Ukraine made the fragility impossible to ignore. European, Middle Eastern, and Asian governments began mobilising sovereign space programmes at a pace not seen since the Cold War. Defence budgets across NATO expanded at historic rates. The most significant strategic realignment in a generation was underway - and ICEYE had built precisely the capability that this new era required.
The watershed operational moment came in 2022, when the Serhiy Prytula Foundation - a Ukrainian civilian charitable organisation fundraising to support the war effort - secured an access to ICEYE satellite capabilities to support Ukraine’s defence effort against Russian invasion. Since September 2022, Ukraine's Defence Intelligence has received more than 5,900 radar satellite images from the system. Over 38% of the entire dataset was used to directly prepare strikes on enemy positions, translating into confirmed losses for Russian forces measured in the billions of dollars. ICEYE had proven its operational worth under the most demanding conditions - warfare at scale.
The sovereign contracts followed in rapid succession. An agreement with the Polish Ministry of National Defence, valued at €200 million, saw ICEYE deliver full SAR capabilities to the Polish Armed Forces in a record-breaking twelve months - a timeline no legacy provider could have matched. Then, in December 2025, came the largest contract in the company's history: a partnership with Rheinmetall to deliver strategic SAR capabilities to the German Armed Forces, valued at approximately €1.7 billion.
Building the ISR Provider of Choice
Today, ICEYE has become the ISR provider of choice for NATO member states and allied governments.
Revenues exceeded €250 million in 2025 and EBITDA has exceeded €100 million. The constellation has surpassed 70 launches. The workforce has crossed 1,000, bound together by a bold engineering culture that drives continuous innovation from satellite hardware through to AI-enabled analytics.
The latest Series F financing round has confirmed what the trajectory had long suggested - ICEYE is now a decacorn, the most valuable NewSpace company in Europe and among the most valuable in the world.
Eight years ago, we invested in two brilliant engineers and a satellite the size of a refrigerator. Today, we watch as those same engineers lead one of the most strategically consequential space companies on the planet. We are proud - genuinely, deeply proud - to have been part of this journey .
And we are equally certain that this is still only a milestone on the much longer road ahead.
Read more in the financial times: https://www.ft.com/content/39dd5512-f7f0-4bf2-9317-cd9b12c7b5ba?syn-25a6b1a6=1
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