Tusk IC raises €15M to bring CMOS satellite chips to mass production

Tusk IC (Leuven) has closed €15 million in a Series A co-led by Matterwave Ventures, FORWARD.one, and Flanders Future Tech Fund (managed by PMV), with participation from the Schaubroeck family and existing investors. The round, announced 17 September 2026, funds the company's move from prototype chips to high-volume production. Founded in January 2018 as a spinout of KU Leuven's ESAT-MICAS research group, Tusk IC is a fabless semiconductor company building beamformer chips for Ka-band satellite antennas. CEO Kathleen Philips (ex-VP at imec, former Managing Director of imec-NL in Eindhoven) joined the company in 2025. Co-founder and CTO Shailesh Kulkarni leads the engineering.

The company's central claim is a fabrication approach that its competitors do not use: standard CMOS silicon, the same process technology that makes consumer microchips in billion-unit volumes, applied to millimeter-wave beamformer chips for Ka-band satellite communications.

Why fabrication process matters

A Ka-band flat-panel antenna needs a beamformer chip to steer its signal electronically — pointing at a satellite without a moving dish. The existing market uses GaAs (gallium arsenide) or SiGe (silicon-germanium) processes, which offer good RF performance but are manufactured in lower-volume fabs at correspondingly higher cost per chip. Tusk IC's engineering integrates RF front-ends, phase shifters, and power amplifiers onto standard bulk silicon wafers, achieving what the company reports as a 30% reduction in thermal energy consumption relative to market alternatives.

The significance of the CMOS route is not just cost. It is access: the standard CMOS supply chain can produce chips at the volumes that a mass-market satellite terminal market demands. Starlink's subscriber count and the proliferation of LEO constellations from Eutelsat OneWeb, Amazon Kuiper, and others have turned satellite internet connectivity from a niche into a volume market. The terminal — the flat-panel antenna that users install at home or on vehicles — is the cost bottleneck that limits adoption. A cheaper chip addresses that bottleneck at the component level.

ESA validation and the European angle

In July 2026, the European Space Agency awarded Tusk IC an industrial commercialisation contract, backed by the Belgian Federal Science Policy Office (BELSPO), to fund the transition from prototype to market-ready hardware. The ESA contract is not funding for research; it is validation that the technology is ready for commercialisation and that a European agency has assessed it as strategically relevant.

Belgium's position in the satellite supply chain gives Tusk IC a meaningful home-field advantage. PMV's Flanders Future Tech Fund — the lead on this round alongside Matterwave and FORWARD.one — has a mandate to back deep-tech commercialisation in Flanders specifically. The Schaubroeck family, a Belgian industrial dynasty, brings manufacturing network access alongside capital.

The round funds the scaling step that determines whether the technology's promise translates to production reality. Prototype performance and mass-volume yield are different problems, and the gap between them has ended more than one semiconductor startup's story.