ICEYE Brand Guidelines: An Aalto University Course, Sea Ice & Radar Microsatellites

A student satellite project that turned into a company.

ICEYE began as a university project. In 2010, thisisFINLAND reported in April 2017, Pekka Laurila, then an engineering student at Aalto University, saw a notice for a new satellite course run by the university’s Department of Radio Science and Engineering, aimed at building the first Finnish satellite. The student project taught him, he told the site, that “you don’t need a lot of people and money to build a satellite.” In 2012 he and two other students set up a business, and they spent two years on a validation project to build a prototype.

Finnish Wikipedia adds detail: Laurila had worked on the Aalto-1 student satellite, and in 2012 he joined another Aalto student, Rafał Modrzewski, on the Aalto Ventures Program, a technology-entrepreneurship course. Funding from Tekes, the Finnish innovation agency, paid for the prototype from autumn 2012. The company, ICEYE Oy, was registered in autumn 2014 and began operating early in 2015, when the technical prototype was finished. ICEYE’s own history page says Modrzewski came to Finland on an Erasmus exchange “and never left.”

The first market the founders saw was the Arctic. Shipping lines and oil companies, Laurila told thisisFINLAND, needed to know quickly how sea ice moves, and government radar satellites updated that picture too slowly. English Wikipedia says ICEYE showed in 2015 that synthetic-aperture radar (SAR) could be used to watch hazardous ice such as pack ice. In September 2015 a grant from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 programme followed, Finnish Wikipedia says, and early investors included True Ventures and Lifeline Ventures.

The university link stayed close. Because the original prototype was made at Aalto, the university is one of the company’s owners, Laurila said in 2017, when ICEYE had 20-plus staff and offices on the Aalto campus in Espoo.

Radar that sees through cloud and darkness.

SAR satellites send radar pulses to the ground and build images from the echoes, so they can work through cloud and at night. English Wikipedia describes ICEYE’s first important innovation as shrinking such a satellite to below 100 kg. The proof-of-concept ICEYE-X1, about 70 kg, went into orbit on 12 January 2018 on an Indian PSLV rocket; Wikipedia and the company both describe it as the first satellite under 100 kg to carry a SAR and as Finland’s first commercial satellite. ICEYE-X2 followed on a SpaceX Falcon 9 in December 2018.

In October 2019 ICEYE began selling commercial access to its imagery, English Wikipedia says, with three satellites in orbit. That year the founders and the Aalto staff involved received the Finnish Engineering Award from the engineers’ union TEK, whose citation called the work “a breakthrough in Finnish space technology.” In November 2020, Finnish Wikipedia says, the company released thousands of radar images for non-commercial use under a Creative Commons licence.

The constellation grew mainly on SpaceX rideshare flights; English Wikipedia says every ICEYE-X launch from 2021 to 2026 used a Falcon 9. Not every satellite made it: in January 2023 ICEYE-X22 failed to separate from the rocket’s upper stage, the company’s first satellite loss. On 5 December 2025 ICEYE announced it had launched 62 satellites, and Wikipedia lists a further 22 launched during 2026. English Wikipedia and the company both describe the fleet as the world’s largest SAR constellation.

ICEYE also sells whole satellites. From 2022, Wikipedia says, governments and large companies could buy their own radar satellites and run them, or have ICEYE run them. The first such sale, in December 2020, was to the Brazilian Air Force; the two satellites launched in May 2022 and were named Carcará 1 and Carcará 2. The company’s history page says production reached one satellite a week in 2025.

Radar from small satellites.

Earth-observation companies sell something most customers never see being made. Their satellites are small, distant and short-lived, so the brand has to be carried by what comes back: the picture, the signal and the map. The companies in this guide build or operate satellites that take optical photographs, record radar echoes, or listen for radio signals from ships, aircraft and the atmosphere, and most of them now describe themselves as data or intelligence businesses rather than satellite makers.

Their public image leans on a few recurring scenes. Crisp overhead views of ports, farmland and city grids show what optical satellites can see from orbit. Radar companies favour grainy, false-colour textures in which water turns dark and buildings glow, because radar images look nothing like photographs. Small satellites appear on clean-room benches under bright light, handled by staff in gowns and gloves, as proof that the hardware is real and made in-house.

On their websites the satellite often gives way to the screen. Maps, dashboards, map layers and charts present the data as something a customer can open and use, and product names tend to describe a platform, a feed or a service rather than a spacecraft. Many of these firms sell to governments and defence ministries as well as to farming, shipping, insurance and mapping businesses, so their language swings between mission and market.

The trade meets at shows such as the GEOINT Symposium in the United States and the European Space Agency’s Living Planet Symposium in Europe, where launches, contracts and new image products are announced. This guide sets out what can be checked about each company — who founded it, who owns it now, where its satellites are built — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

From sea ice to sovereign satellites.

ICEYE is still private and still based in Espoo. English Wikipedia names Modrzewski as chief executive and chairman, and says the company has more than 900 staff and offices in Finland, Poland, Spain, Greece, the United Kingdom and the United States. In June 2026, Wikipedia says, a Series F round was led by General Atlantic, with Nokia, the Qatar Investment Authority and TCV among the new backers.

Much of its recent work is for governments. In August 2022, English Wikipedia says, ICEYE signed a contract with a Ukrainian charitable foundation that gave the Armed Forces of Ukraine access to one of its satellites; the company’s history page calls this its first major defence partnership. In May 2025 Poland agreed to buy three radar satellites, and ICEYE says it handed the system over to the Polish Armed Forces in 2026. In December 2025 ICEYE and its joint venture with Rheinmetall, Rheinmetall ICEYE Space Solutions, signed a contract with Germany for radar satellite data services, which Wikipedia calls ICEYE’s largest contract to date. Finnish Wikipedia reports that Sweden’s armed forces are also buying ICEYE satellites, news announced on 12 January 2026.

The civil side remains. The company says its imagery is used for flood and wildfire work for insurers and governments, and its website lists uses from port and border monitoring to deforestation, sea ice and oil spills. Its line is “Truth. Through uninterrupted Earth Observation.”

For a design guide, ICEYE shows how a name taken from a first use — Arctic ice — can carry a company well beyond it, set in plain capitals. Compare Capella Space, another radar-satellite maker, and Planet, which built its fleet from small optical satellites. For this guide we use a polar blue, ice white and a radar teal with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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