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Finnish satellite intelligence company ICEYE Oy is on track to grow revenue to more than €1 billion ($1.2 billion) next year as a raft of government orders allows it to ramp up production.

Revenue last year exceeded €250 million, more than doubling from the prior year and topping the company’s projections by 25%.

“It’s reasonable to expect that we will be able to deliver similar growth rates as in the previous years” through 2026 and 2027, Chief Financial Officer Magdalena Bartos said in an interview on Tuesday.

ICEYE is a beneficiary of increased defense spending across Europe as the threat from Russia has intensified, spurring a flood of cash into firms hunting for military contracts.

The Espoo, Finland-based company reported earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization of more than €100 million last year, and operating cash flow of exceeding €130 million, Bartos said.

“It’s not that this inflection point was a surprise to us, it was part of the plan,” Chief Executive Officer Rafal Modrzewski said. “I’ve had many conversations where people were telling me, that’s such an overnight success — and I was telling them, look, that’s an overnight success 10 years in the making.”

ICEYE, founded in 2014, has a constellation of 64 satellites orbiting the earth every 90 minutes providing sharp images of the ground below through smoke, clouds and darkness. Use cases include tracking movements of troops, flooding or lava flows. It’s more than 25 more satellites to space this year, and more the year after.

ICEYE builds its own satellites in an unassuming office building at a university campus area just outside of Helsinki. It takes 10 to 11 weeks to build a launch-ready satellite.

It’s tracking toward an annual production rate of 50 satellites by the end of April and already has booked launch dates for all of the planned units, Modrzewski said.

“Our target will be to keep on doubling the production rate,” he said. “Easily 100 satellites a year is going to be our next short-term target.”

ICEYE controls much of the production process but relies on external partners for mechanical vibration testing, required by SpaceX for each satellite that will hitch a ride on its rocket. The Finnish company will bring that in-house from June to further accelerate production.

ICEYE’s satellites use a radar beam to capture ground measurements, with that data used to construct the image. The company has observed jamming and spoofing of global positioning satellite signals in space, but is able to mitigate the activity, it said.

ICEYE’s €1.5 billion order backlog is contract-based, including deals with the defense forces of Finland, Sweden, Poland, Portugal, Greece and the Netherlands. It’s also supplying the German government together with Rheinmetall AG.

In December, ICEYE raised €150 million in a funding round, taking its total raised to €600 million. The company has “no immediate needs for funding,” Bartos said. Improved profitability, cash flow and contract visibility should support a “significant step up” in valuation compared with the €2.4 billion disclosed with the latest round, Bartos said.

It’s one of the hottest candidates seen to be considering an initial public offering in the defense space.

Modrzewski, who in June signaled an IPO was likely within 12 to 36 months, walked back those comments in the interview.

“When the business decides that it makes most sense to raise a lot of capital to accelerate the growth, that’s when we will decide whether to IPO or do it from private markets,” Modrzewski said. “IPO is not a target in itself for this business.”

Top photograph: Magdalena Bartos in Espoo, Finland, on March 10, 2026; photo credit: Alessandro Rampazzo/Bloomberg

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