Zaitra: EIC Accelerator Bet on Onboard AI for Satellites

An optical Earth observation satellite photographs whatever is below it, clouds included. The images are stored, sent to a ground station when one comes into view and processed on the ground, which CORDIS describes as a delay of hours, days or weeks. Zaitra, a Brno company founded in 2020 by three engineers, runs neural networks on the satellite itself, so that the spacecraft discards cloudy frames, picks out objects of interest and sends down the result rather than the raw picture. "We sell information, not images," chief executive Marek Marušin told Forbes in October 2025.

The EIC Accelerator selected Zaitra's SKAISEN project at its October 2025 cut-off for blended finance. CORDIS records an EU contribution of €2,458,750 under grant agreement 101298361, signed on 29 May 2026, for a project running from 1 June 2026 to 31 May 2028. The Czech Enterprise Europe Network gives the grant as €2.5 million and says the company is negotiating an investment from the EIC Fund. Five months into the project, the record is a promise and a track record that predates it.

A cloud filter that fits in two and a half watts

The technical core is public. In July 2022 the three founders and two co-authors published CloudSatNet-1 in Remote Sensing: a quantised convolutional neural network that classifies cloud cover on a low-cost Xilinx Zynq-7020 FPGA. Using only the red, green and blue bands, it reached up to 90% accuracy, and 94.4% with a 2.23% false-positive rate for the 4-bit model once snow and ice tiles were left out. It processed 15 frames a second at an average of 2.5 watts.

The same year, according to Brno University of Technology, Zaitra took part in the VZLUSAT-2 demonstration mission and showed it could run AI processing in orbit; Forbes reports that the software filtered out cloudy images there and dates the first prototype test in space to July 2022. The product line has since grown beyond the cloud filter. The company website lists SKAISEN for onboard object detection, SKAIDOCK, a space-qualified processing unit built on a Xiphos Q8J processor, and SKAIPACK, a compression suite for multispectral and hyperspectral images.

What has flown

The second flight is better documented. Via Satellite reported in January 2025 that Zaitra supplied SKAISEN and SKAIDOCK for TROLL, a hyperspectral nanosatellite built by TRL Space of Brno and launched that month on the Transporter-12 rideshare mission. Forbes wrote in October 2025 that the hardware and software on TROLL had passed all operational tests. No image set, detection rate or downlink saving from TROLL has been published, so how well the system performed in orbit cannot be checked from public sources.

The sources also disagree on dates. The company website labels SKAISEN "Proven in Space 2024" and SKAIDOCK "Proven in Space 2025", while the satsearch listing says SKAISEN "was demonstrated in orbit early 2025". Before that, an ESA-funded project also called SKAISEN, led by Zaitra with SatRev of Wrocław and two unnamed partners, was set up to run functional and environmental tests of the algorithm ahead of flight, according to Invest in Wrocław in January 2024.

Customers the company counts but does not name

Zaitra sells components to satellite manufacturers and mission owners, per Via Satellite, which also reported that it was integrating its technology into two commercial satellites. Forbes put the number of paying customers at about ten and wrote that the company had sold nearly a dozen SKAIDOCK units in 2025. Neither publication names a customer.

The one named partnership is with Simera Sense, a Belgian maker of satellite cameras. The two companies announced in November 2025 that Zaitra's software and compression would process data from Simera Sense's MultiScape100 and HyperScape100 imagers in orbit, sending the highest-priority pixels to analysts within minutes, as Space and Defense reported. The announcement names no mission or customer.

What SKAISEN promises the EIC

The EIC project ties the parts together. CORDIS describes three components: SKAISEN Edge, the detection algorithms running in orbit; SKAIDOCK, the onboard hardware; and SKAISEN Ground, a cloud platform that delivers the results to users. Flown across constellations, the system is meant to turn satellites from passive data collectors into what the project calls autonomous sensing nodes, with insights reaching users in under ten minutes. The Czech EEN profile adds the business plan: Zaitra wants to move from supplying components to operating its own satellites and selling tailored data, for users such as mining companies, coast guards looking for illegal fishing, the defence industry and responders to floods and forest fires.

CORDIS lists no total project cost and no results yet, as expected for a project that started in June 2026. The scorecard below therefore records what can already be checked against what still has to be shown.

1. SKAISEN Edge in orbitFlown before the grantCloud filtering on VZLUSAT-2 in 2022 and SKAISEN on TROLL in 2025, per Brno University of Technology, Via Satellite and Forbes; no performance data published.
2. SKAIDOCK onboard hardwareOn saleListed on the company website as flown in 2025; Forbes reports nearly a dozen units sold that year.
3. SKAISEN Ground platformNot publicNo product page, user or launch date found.
4. Insights in under ten minutesTargetThe project's own goal; no measured end-to-end time has been published.
5. Own AI node or constellationPlannedForbes reports a seed round being raised for it in October 2025; no closed round or launch announced.

Growing staff, thinning equity

Zaitra files micro-entity accounts in the Czech collection of deeds: a balance sheet and notes, without a profit and loss statement. The notes give an average of 5 employees in 2023, 9 in 2024 and 15 in 2025, with personnel costs rising from CZK 4.63 million to CZK 10.72 million and then CZK 19.75 million. Forbes described the team as having grown from 5 to 25 people in the year to October 2025; that is a headcount at one date, while the accounts give a yearly average, and the two measures do not have to match.

The balance sheet grew with the team. Total assets rose from CZK 7.18 million at the end of 2023 to CZK 21.82 million at the end of 2024 and CZK 30.73 million at the end of 2025. Equity was CZK 86,000 at the end of 2024 and minus CZK 4.86 million a year later, against liabilities of CZK 35.59 million. The notes list loans from third parties of CZK 15.41 million at the end of 2025, down from CZK 17.58 million a year earlier, and do not say who the lenders are. The commercial register lists the three founders and Cape Free s.r.o. as the only shareholders; none of the investors named in the October 2024 round appears among them, and the register does not show the terms of that round.

Money from many small sources

The only disclosed equity round is a €1.7 million pre-seed announced on 8 October 2024 and led by Sunfish Partners of Berlin and Warsaw, with Czech Founders VC and Jan Široký, a former chief technology officer of Mews, as Vestbee and Via Satellite both reported; the European Space Agency and the Technology Agency of the Czech Republic were named alongside them. Forbes reported in October 2025 that a seed round was being raised to fund the company's first own AI node and an expansion into the United States; no closed seed round has been announced.

Public support is the larger thread in the accounts. The 2024 notes record a CZK 1.9 million prize from the EU space agency EUSPA's CASSINI Business Accelerator and subsidies from the TAČR TREND programme and three smaller schemes. The 2025 notes list seven programmes worth CZK 8.9 million in total, led by TAČR TREND at CZK 2.67 million and TAČR SIGMA at CZK 2.42 million. The EEN profile also credits a CZK 700,000 grant through the Prototype and Verify programme with helping get the software into orbit. No EIC Fund investment in Zaitra has been announced, and the EIC Fund's public pages do not list it.

Faster data from European satellites

European public money has reached Zaitra through several doors: an ESA project, a prize from the EU space agency's accelerator, Czech research and investment agencies, and now the EIC. The uses CORDIS names for the project, security, emergency response and infrastructure monitoring, are ones where the project argues that days of ground processing are too slow. The chain Zaitra works in is largely European, from TRL Space in Brno to Simera Sense in Belgium, while its SKAIDOCK unit is built on a processor from Xiphos, and its next growth market, according to Forbes, is the United States.

Zaitra is active: the Czech register ARES shows the company without any insolvency entry and last updated in August 2026, the commercial register extract records no liquidation or name change, and the 2025 accounts were filed on 30 June 2026.

The reporting is based on publicly available sources, listed below.