Kymeta Corporation

Kymeta builds satellite antennas with no moving parts. The Redmond, Washington company spun out of Intellectual Ventures in 2012 on metamaterials research traced back to Duke University, and its aperture steers a beam electronically through a liquid crystal metasurface rather than by swinging a dish at the sky. Bill Gates has backed it from the start, leading an $85 million round in 2020 and a further $84 million in 2022. Hanwha Systems of South Korea put in $30 million in 2020, cleared by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States the following May, and took a board seat. Trinity Capital added a $20 million growth facility in 2024. Manny Mora, previously of General Dynamics Mission Systems, took over as chief executive in November 2025 with defense work as the stated priority.

Products run to five terminals. Osprey u8 is the military workhorse, sold in a geostationary version and a hybrid that moves between geostationary and low earth orbit and works on Eutelsat OneWeb. Goshawk u8, shown in late 2024, is the multi-orbit on-the-move terminal aimed at allied defence ministries and folds cellular into the mix. Hawk u8 was the first flat panel approved on the Eutelsat OneWeb low earth orbit network for land mobility, and Peregrine u8 covers maritime users on the same constellation. Kestrel u5 arrived in March 2026 as the compact option, under 11 kilograms and around 100 watts, with low probability of detection features and tolerance for geostationary, low earth, highly elliptical and other orbits, which puts it within reach of unmanned platforms. A multi-band Ku and Ka aperture called the KuKa 8 Series is promised commercially in 2027, with prototypes going to selected customers from mid 2026.

The applications divide three ways on the company's own pages. Military and government covers defense units, security and intelligence agencies, border security, emergency services and wildfire fighting, and the vocabulary throughout is communications on the move and communications on the pause. Maritime covers commercial shipping and passenger transportation. Land covers commercial fleets, passenger bus and rail, energy sites and humanitarian work. Connectivity is sold as a service rather than left to the buyer to assemble, with geostationary airtime packages and a bundle built for the US Department of Defense mixing Ku band geostationary capacity, Eutelsat OneWeb low earth orbit, transmission security and 4G LTE. Support runs behind that, covering training, an access app and portal, warranty policies and software updates.

Defense interest has firmed up considerably. The US Army picked Kymeta as a multi-orbit satellite communications supplier for its Next Generation Command and Control pilot in October 2025, after assessments at Project Convergence and the network modernization experiment series. The Office of Naval Research followed in 2026 with a three year development agreement for multi-band Ku and Ka work. Japan Display signed a master supply agreement in early 2026 covering the next aperture generation, and interoperability testing with Kepler satellites has pushed the u8 towards roughly 100 Mbps in both directions.