TUSK IC, a fabless semiconductor company spun out of KU Leuven, has closed a €15 million Series A to put its Ka-band satellite chips into volume production.
Matterwave Ventures, FORWARD.one and the Flanders Future Tech Fund, managed by PMV, led the round. The Schaubroeck family joined, alongside continued backing from existing investors.
The Antwerp company builds highly integrated millimetre-wave circuits and antenna modules for satellite communications, industrial sensing and automotive radar. Founded in 2018 out of KU Leuven’s mmWave research group, it spent its early years designing radar chips before expanding into satellite hardware in 2022.
Its core claim is economics. As satellite constellations multiply, the bottleneck shifts to the ground segment, where user terminals must become cheaper and more capable. TUSK IC argues that pairing mmWave performance with standard CMOS manufacturing is what makes high-performance terminals scalable.
Investors frame the opportunity beyond orbit. As Silviu Apostu, a partner at Matterwave, puts it, what will settle the future of connectivity is not only the hardware flying overhead but the technology that lets ground terminals be built cheaply at volume – the choke point TUSK IC attacks.
Europe has been pushing to build sovereign capacity across the space stack, from launch to components. Ground-segment silicon has drawn less attention than satellites themselves, even though it determines how much bandwidth a constellation can actually deliver to customers.
