TUSK IC raises €15M Series A for satellite chips made in Antwerp
Antwerp's KU Leuven spin-out landed €15M from a German, Dutch and Flemish syndicate to mass-produce Ka-band beamformer chips in CMOS - the silicon that sets what a satellite terminal costs.
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Founded 2018 · Antwerp, Belgium
TUSK IC, the Antwerp-based KU Leuven spin-out designing Ka-band satellite communication chips in standard CMOS, has raised a €15M Series A co-led by Matterwave Ventures, FORWARD.one and the PMV-managed Flanders Future Tech Fund to move its beamformer chips from prototype to high-volume production.
Europe keeps hearing it cannot do semiconductors at scale – and yet the growth cheque for one of the more contrarian chip bets on the continent just landed entirely from European pockets. Below, I lay out the round, the chip itself, and why the ground segment is where satellite internet economics actually get decided.
Three co-leads and a family cheque
TUSK IC announced the €15M Series A on 17 September 2026. Three funds share the lead: Matterwave Ventures, the Munich-based industrial deeptech investor; FORWARD.one, the Dutch hardware specialist; and the Flanders Future Tech Fund, managed by PMV, the Flemish region’s investment company. The Schaubroeck family and existing investors also participated.
The money has one job: getting the company’s ConnectKa chip line through qualification testing and into its first production batch. IO+ reports small-batch production expected in 2027 and full-scale manufacturing in 2028, with early samples targeted at select customers before the end of 2026.
“This investment is a strong endorsement of both our technology and our team,” said CEO Kathleen Philips in the announcement. Silviu Apostu of Matterwave Ventures put the thesis in one line: “TUSK IC combines leading-edge mmWave innovation with the economics and scalability of standard CMOS.”
Standard CMOS against the industry’s specialty silicon
Founded in 2018 as a spin-out of KU Leuven’s MICAS microelectronics lab, TUSK IC is a fabless designer of beamformer chips and low-noise amplifiers for Ka-band satellite terminals – the electronically steerable flat antennas that connect users on the ground to LEO and MEO constellations.
The contrarian part is the material. The industry builds these front-ends on silicon-germanium or specialty processes; TUSK claims the first standard-CMOS beamformer ICs for Ka-band, which means mainstream foundry capacity, mainstream cost curves, and – per IO+ – roughly 30% lower power consumption than comparable alternatives. The good news is the approach has already survived contact with a demanding customer: the European Space Agency awarded TUSK an ARTES Industrial Competitiveness contract in July 2026, backed by Belgium’s BELSPO, and an integration partnership with a satellite antenna manufacturer is underway.
So why does a beamformer chip matter more than the satellites themselves? Because constellations are only as commercial as their cheapest terminal. The beamformer silicon sits at the heart of every electronically steerable antenna, and its cost and power draw are what keep flat-panel terminals expensive for the mass market that Starlink, OneWeb and Europe’s IRIS² are all chasing.
A flat-panel antenna market compounding at 29 percent
The segment TUSK sells into is small today and steep tomorrow: the flat antenna market is valued at USD 0.93bn in 2026 and projected to reach USD 3.38bn by 2031, a 29.36% CAGR (Mordor Intelligence, 2026-2031 forecast). A component supplier that gets qualified now rides that whole curve.
For scale inside our own fundraising data: the €15M sits an order of magnitude below the $205M that EnduroSat raised to mass-produce satellites from Sofia this same week, and a notch above the €6M Series A that Laki Power closed for grid monitoring from Reykjavik. Europe’s space value chain is getting funded at both ends: the satellites and the silicon that talks to them.
Flanders is writing its own deeptech cheques
We are called a single market, yet our satellite terminals still largely run on imported specialty silicon. That is exactly what makes this syndicate worth reading twice: a German industrial fund, a Dutch hardware fund and Flemish public capital co-leading a Belgian chip round is European deeptech funding working as a team, without waiting for a US term sheet.
The round also says something about patience. Eight years separate the KU Leuven lab from this production-scale financing – the normal clock for semiconductor spin-outs, and the reason regional instruments like PMV’s Flanders Future Tech Fund exist at all. What we are seeing across the ecosystem is public-private syndicates carrying university deeptech through the years venture math alone would not.
What to watch from here: sample deliveries to customers in the coming months, the 2027 small-batch run, and whether ConnectKa lands inside a named terminal maker – the moment a chip company stops being a promise and starts being a supplier. Antwerp already ships diamonds and cargo; satellite silicon would be a fine addition to the manifest. The opportunity is clear – let’s watch the ground segment, not just the launches!
