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Headline lessons
ICEYE’s founding story started inside Aalto University’s nanosatellite ecosystem. The founders met at Aalto when attending the same courses during their time at the university. Finland ended up becoming the natural homebase for the company as this is where they met.
At the beginning, the company was extremely small. Rafal describes it as “only really two of us.” He had moved from Poland to Finland to study radio science engineering at Aalto, and his co-founder Pekka Laurila was Finnish and also studying there. From the start, they leaned into an operating principle they later described explicitly: progress comes from learning by doing, and there are no shortcuts.
The founders of ICEYE, Pekka & Rafal.
One of the earliest ways they reduced the “first-time founder” risk was by adding experience around the table early. Rafal sought out a mentor with directly relevant scale experience, a former CEO of a publicly traded company in the same area, and turned that relationship into a steady cadence. A one-hour weekly session with the same person became part of how the founders made decisions while they were still becoming a company, not just a technical effort.
ICEYE’s ambition wasn’t just to put a satellite in orbit. The goal was a time-critical data stream business: reliable information at a cadence that matches how decisions are made in the real world. Radar imaging made that promise credible because it works day and night and through cloud cover, and a large constellation could raise revisit rates to “human time scale” monitoring.
That thesis only became viable because the surrounding ecosystem shifted. The way they saw it was that space started to look less like bespoke aerospace and more like an industrial stack: more standardised manufacturing, commercial launch availability, and better software and analytics to turn imagery into usable outputs.
When they worked backwards from the desired product, they hit a hard constraint early. Buying imagery did not give enough capacity for time-critical service. Leasing constellation capacity was too expensive or too slow and buying a satellite or sensor was not available in the way they needed. That pushed them into a clear strategic conclusion, where if they wanted to take this off the ground, they had to build the stack themselves, from sensor to satellite to constellation.
Inside that commitment, they held onto a simple rule from early on: always ask your customer. They were not stubborn about a fixed product shape, and they expected the angle to move as they learned where demand was real.
The first major hurdle the crossed was utilising public funding. They secured an early government grant, which Rafal saw as foundational because it paid for the work before the company had a product or revenue. With funding in place, their next goal became to prove the fundamental technology could actually work in practice.
They also discovered quickly that they could not buy their way to the core component. Back in the early days, the sensor they needed did not exist in the form required, so they had to build it from the ground up. The R&D years were run as a focused technical mission toward one objective: make a small SAR system work well enough that it could eventually fly in space.
Progress came through a prototype ladder and fast iteration rather than one big build. They started with a mobile radar prototype on wheels, then pushed the sensor into an airplane to prove the concept with airborne demos, and kept shrinking and rebuilding the instruments as they learned. Over time this became a repeated build–test–rebuild loop, and they ended up going through roughly ten instrument versions before the first on-orbit unit. Throughout that phase, they leaned on a diverse engineering team and a trial-and-error approach with quick turnarounds to keep the learning cycle tight inside a difficult domain.
Early development work at ICEYE.
Once airborne testing worked, they were able to turn their prototype into a real offering. The team used grant funding to pay for aircraft access, flew imaging missions, and delivered the output to customers as an airborne service. It was not profitable, but it created something they could sell before a satellite existed.
That early service did two jobs at the same time. It kept the customer loop active because they were in continuous dialogue about what customers would do with the data. It also forced the company to learn the operational side early, including how to handle large data volumes and workflows. Instead of waiting for the “final form” in orbit, they proved capability step by step while getting paid to keep moving.
This stage also demanded straightforward founder-led sales. After the tech was good enough to show, the next constraint was landing the first real contracts. The way the team handled this was through persistence in sales. They would work towards getting a first contact and do as many sales trips as it took to land a customer. Early traction came through this very persistence and by showing customers something they could see and evaluate.