Veoware: EIC Accelerator Money Put Satellite Gyroscopes in Orbit

Small satellites have a steering problem. Most turn with reaction wheels, spinning flywheels that are cheap and reliable but slow. A satellite that needs a minute to swing its camera from one target to the next photographs fewer targets per pass. Veoware, a company from Leuven, builds a smaller version of the device large spacecraft use instead: the control moment gyroscope, which the company says gives ten times the torque of a reaction wheel.

In 2021 the European Innovation Council agreed to fund the step that sinks most space hardware start-ups: proving the product in orbit. Veoware's project, SATAGILITY-GO2MARKET, received €1,510,469 from the EU. It flew twice within the project's lifetime. What followed is a company that has tripled its staff, reached its highest gross margin yet in 2025, and carried a negative equity position for two years running.

What Veoware Sells Today

Veoware now offers a family of attitude-control hardware rather than a single device. Its website lists three control moment gyroscopes (micro, mini and medium) for spacecraft of 50 to 700 kilograms, four reaction wheels for satellites from 12U CubeSats up to 200 kilograms, and gimbal mechanisms. The product that carried the EIC project, the microCMG, stores 0.7 Nms of momentum, weighs 2.4 kilograms and fits in a 97 × 97 × 189 millimetre box, according to its satsearch listing. The larger miniCMG is listed at 2.8 Nms.

The company is visibly active in its market. It is listed as a sponsor of both SmallSat Europe 2026 and the SmallSat Symposium 2026. What it does not publish is a customer list, prices or a count of units delivered. The website's "trusted by" row shows ESA, the EIC and the investor Seraphim, which are funders and partners rather than paying satellite operators.

The Technology: Trading Wheels for Gyroscopes

A reaction wheel turns a satellite by spinning up or slowing down: push the wheel one way and the spacecraft rotates the other. The torque it can deliver is limited by how fast its motor can change speed. A control moment gyroscope keeps its rotor spinning at a constant rate and instead tilts the spinning rotor on a gimbal. Tilting a large stored momentum produces a much larger torque for the same power, which is why space stations and big Earth-observation satellites have used the technique for decades.

The hard part is shrinking it. Gimbals, slip rings and the control software that avoids so-called singularities, orientations in which a cluster of gyroscopes loses the ability to push in some direction, are difficult to make small, cheap and reliable. Veoware's pitch is a CMG sized for the small-satellite market, and a supply chain free of ITAR, the United States arms-export rules that restrict many American space components. The ten-times-more-agile figure is the company's own claim; no independent performance data from its flights has been published.

What the EIC Project Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

SATAGILITY-GO2MARKET ran from 1 April 2022 to 31 October 2023 under the 2021 Open call. Its objective was narrow and testable: take a microCMG that was "fully tested and qualified on ground" into orbit, because customers would not buy it without flight heritage, and scale up the sales team to serve customers by 2023. Veoware asked for €1.51 million, well below the €2.5 million ceiling.

The project's CORDIS report is unusually specific. Veoware built four microCMG units, two for flight and two spares, and bought rides from two in-orbit demonstration providers. The first unit launched with D-Orbit on SpaceX's Transporter-7 mission on 1 April 2023. The second flew with Exotrail on Transporter-9 on 11 November 2023. On 14 November the company announced a successful in-orbit functional test, and it now describes itself as the first European company to fly a micro control moment gyroscope.

1. In-orbit demonstrationDeliveredTwo flights in 2023, both inside the project period; in-orbit testing reported on CORDIS and in the satsearch product record.
2. Scale up the sales teamDeliveredStaff rose from 6.8 full-time equivalents in 2022 to 20.4 in 2025, according to the filed accounts.
3. First customers by 2023PartialCORDIS reports "early sales ahead of schedule" and more than 100 prospects engaged; no customer has been named publicly.
4. Independent performance dataNot publicThe flight results are described by the company; no mission operator or paper has published the measured agility.

Measured against its own plan, this is one of the cleaner EIC Accelerator records: a concrete technical milestone, reached early, and documented in the EU's own database. The caveat is that the public evidence of success still comes almost entirely from Veoware itself.

What Veoware Has Achieved Since the Award

The commercial signal has strengthened. Veoware files accounts that do not disclose turnover, so gross margin is the best public measure of how much it sells. It rose from €319,033 in 2021 to €1.98 million in 2023, fell back to €808,747 in 2024, and reached €2.71 million in 2025, the highest in the company's history.

The workforce followed. Scaling the team was half of the EIC project's stated purpose, and the filed accounts show average staff tripling in three years.

The Money: Profitable Once, Leveraged Now

Veoware's accounts, reported identically by Companyweb and Staatsbladmonitor, tell a more complicated story than the flight record. The company turned a profit of €548,158 in 2023, the year both units flew. In 2024 it lost €1,173,812, and equity fell from €587,693 to minus €586,118.

In 2025 the loss narrowed to €170,216, but the balance sheet kept moving in one direction. Debt reached €5,619,081 against total assets of €4,862,746, leaving equity at minus €756,335. Over the last two years, as staff and sales grew, liabilities rose. The Official Gazette records a change of statutes in May 2024 and two changes of registered office that year, but no capital increase. In September 2024 Veoware announced €2.5 million from imec.istart future fund, Ostbelgieninvest, Moveinvest and Henkes & Co to improve its gyroscopes and expand into the United States. The announcement does not say whether the money came as shares or loans.

Why Europe Should Care

Veoware sits squarely inside one of the EU's most explicit industrial goals. The Commission runs a dedicated technological non-dependence effort for space, aimed at giving Europe "free, unrestricted access" to critical space technology, and funds it through its space research budget. A European, ITAR-free attitude-control product is exactly the kind of component that programme exists to secure: satellites built in Europe with American actuators can be held up by US export licensing.

The EU Space Act, proposed on 25 June 2025, pushes the same way, with the stated aim of growing the EU space sector and reducing reliance on third-country entities. Faster-slewing small satellites also serve the uses the CORDIS objective names: climate monitoring, disaster response and security, where the number of images per pass matters.

The Verdict

Veoware has not been asked for comment for this article. It is based entirely on public records, company statements and EU project data, linked throughout.