Centiel Brand Guidelines: The Lugano Modular UPS Maker That Listed on SIX in 2026

A Ticino UPS maker with a Ticino ancestor.

Centiel is a young company with an older lineage. The Swiss news agency report carried by Ticinonline in April 2026 says it was founded in 2015 and that its roots lie in Newave, another UPS maker from the canton of Ticino, which was listed on the Swiss stock exchange from 2007 until it was bought by ABB in 2012. The same report says Centiel grew from about 20 people at the start to about 200.

Its home is Cadro, a quarter of Lugano in the Italian-speaking south of Switzerland, where the company gives the address of its global headquarters. SIX Swiss Exchange, announcing its listing in April 2026, named Gerardo Lecuona as Centiel’s co-founder, board member and chief executive.

Centiel describes itself as a Swiss-based technology company that designs, manufactures and supplies power protection for critical installations, and says it is present in more than 60 countries through regional offices and channel partners. It also says its team was behind early transformer-less UPS designs and early three-phase modular UPS systems. The law firm Walder Wyss, which advised it on the 2026 listing, described the company in similar terms, as building on expertise in transformer-less and modular UPS technology.

Modules, cabinets and a Swiss-made claim.

A UPS, or uninterruptible power supply, keeps equipment running when the mains supply fails or falters. Centiel’s range is built around three-phase systems for data centres and other buildings that cannot go dark. Its website lists four main families: StratusPower, a modular system in cabinets for larger data centres; CumulusPower, a modular system for small and medium installations, with a single-phase X1 version; PremiumTower, a line of tower units in several voltages; and EssentialPower X1, a single-phase unit for small IT rooms. It also sells energy storage and network management software. By the company’s figures, a single StratusPower cabinet covers ratings from 10 kW to 1,500 kW, and CumulusPower takes up to 60 modules of 60 kW in parallel. The April 2026 news agency report says what sets Centiel apart from Newave is that it developed a next generation of modular UPS.

The company’s technical signature is a name. It calls its modular design DARA, short for Distributed Active Redundant Architecture, in which, it says, each module is a complete UPS with its own control, power converters and static bypass, so that modules can be isolated and exchanged while the others carry the load. A related control system, which it calls DDM, lets the modules share decisions, the company says.

Its manufacturing claim is direct. Centiel says StratusPower is “designed and manufactured in Switzerland” and that CumulusPower is “manufactured in Switzerland,” and it uses a “Swiss Made” label on its product pages; we give those as the company’s statements. The April 2026 news agency report lists the kinds of customer its products serve: data centres, hospitals, manufacturing, research and public administration.

Centiel also reports recognition from the trade. It says it won the Modernisation & Retrofit Project of the Year category at the Data Centre Review Excellence Awards 2026, for replacing the UPS at Redcentric’s colocation site at Heathrow Corporate Park, near London, with StratusPower.

Design and documentation.

The makers of uninterruptible power supplies, power distribution and precision cooling sell equipment that most people never see. It stands in plant rooms and data halls behind locked doors, so the companies tend to show it in place: long rows of grey cabinets under white light, battery strings racked floor to ceiling, switchgear with its doors open, and chillers and heat-rejection units lined up on rooftops and in yards outside.

The data hall itself has become the stock image of the trade. Photographs and renderings return again and again to cold-aisle containment, with server racks closed in behind glass doors and ceiling panels, to cooling units set between the racks, and to engineers with laptops checking a cabinet’s display. As computing loads have grown, liquid-cooling pipework, coolant units and prefabricated modules built off site have joined the cabinets in the pictures.

Factories, test laboratories and trade fairs supply the rest. These companies often show their own production lines and test bays, where equipment is run before it ships, and the industry gathers at events such as Data Centre World and the DCD conference series, where makers fill stands with UPS cabinets, cooling units and power distribution gear and present new ranges to data-centre operators and engineers. Corporate language leans on continuity: Vertiv, for example, presented itself as “Architects of Continuity” when it listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2020.

The companies in this guide range from listed groups to family firms, and several carry long histories under changing owners. This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it, and where it says its products are made — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A listing by merger.

Centiel became a listed company in 2026 by an unusual route. Rather than a conventional initial public offering, it merged with HT5 AG, a company originating from the former Hochdorf group, a Lucerne dairy business, according to Walder Wyss and Ticinonline. Shareholders of both companies approved the deal at their annual meetings; the registered office moved to Lugano and the combined company took the Centiel name. Its shares began trading on the SIX Swiss Exchange on 17 April 2026 under the ticker CNTL, SIX announced, after an opening-bell ceremony at the exchange in Zurich. The company’s own releases call it Centiel SA; the German and English forms Centiel AG and Centiel Ltd. also appear in the reports.

The listing made Centiel a public company, with its shares traded on the exchange rather than held privately. In his statement to SIX, Lecuona called the listing a new chapter and said the company was well placed to scale its technology for critical infrastructure.

The business reaches well beyond Ticino. The company has a British arm, Centiel UK, and in October 2026 it announced a partnership in Egypt with El Sewedy Electromechanical, part of the El Sewedy group. In September 2026 it exhibited at Data Centre World Asia in Singapore, with engineers from its Swiss headquarters on the stand, and its website’s articles now address AI data centres, colocation and grid connection rules. Its home page leads with the line “Powering the minds of tomorrow,” followed by panels on AI data centres, healthcare, mobility, automation and finance, each paired with a named product.

For a design guide, Centiel shows how a young engineering company can lean on a place name and one architecture idea. Compare ABB, which bought its predecessor Newave, and Piller, a much older UPS maker in Germany. For this guide we use a lake blue, a pale grey and a red with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Centiel’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.