We are a small, fully remote team of 34 people, distributed across Iceland, Estonia, Germany, Portugal, and the UK. We have been building Helion for seven years and we plan to keep building it for at least another ten.
Helion started in 2019 as a private tool for a 3-spacecraft constellation being built by three friends in Tallinn. The premise was simple: commercial operators should not have to write and maintain their own ground software. The ground software is not the product. The data and the tasking are the product. We spent three years on the platform and the rest of the time on keeping it running.
It is a slow, expensive, and intentionally boring way to build a platform. We believe it is the only way to build this platform.
We took a seed round in 2020 and a Series A in 2023. We are not actively raising. The company is profitable on subscription revenue alone. We do not take strategic investor money, and we do not have a "data" department.
We ship a major release every six to eight weeks. Between major releases, we ship small hotfixes and silent server updates. The release cadence is set by the platform team and the customer support team, not by marketing or finance. We do not crunch, and we have not missed a release window in three years.
Honesty. Most of the worst things that have happened to Helion — the 4.7 telemetry desync, the 4.10 Svalbard cutover, the 4.11 ground-station incident — were made worse by us not being honest fast enough. We have learned. The "what we got wrong" sections in the post-mortems are now written before the post-mortem, and we publish them.
Thirty-four people. The full roster is on the press page. We hire slowly and we keep people. Average tenure at Helion Aerospace is 5.4 years.