One year of SatEnlight: from an idea to a growing deep-tech company

On 17 July 2026, SatEnlight celebrated its first anniversary as a company.

Exactly twelve months earlier, the founders had been sitting in a notary’s office signing the documents that formally started the company’s journey.

Between July 2025 and July 2026, much changed.

The team expanded, new collaborations were established and SatEnlight’s optical communication technology progressively moved outside the laboratory and into increasingly realistic environments.

The first year also brought recognition from both the innovation and space communities.

During that period, SatEnlight won StartCup Lombardia and the Thales Alenia Space Corporate Prize, entered acceleration and incubation programmes, raised new capital, presented its research internationally and won the Startup Space Competition in Washington, D.C.

But the first twelve months were also defined by the less visible side of building deep technology: engineering challenges, experiments that needed to be repeated, long development cycles and continuous work to transform scientific research into a scalable communication technology.

The first anniversary was therefore less a finish line than a checkpoint.

By July 2026, SatEnlight was already preparing for new field tests, new international programmes and the next stages of development of its free-space optical communication systems.