Synspective

Each StriX satellite masses between roughly 100 and 150 kilograms and launches folded into a box under a metre on a side, then unfolds a five-metre slot-array antenna that does the actual work. In its sharpest mode it resolves about a quarter of a metre; in its widest it trades down to 3.6 metres across a swath of up to thirty kilometres. Radar sees at night and through cloud, which is the reason to build it at all, but Synspective's commercial bet is not on selling pictures. It is on Land Displacement Monitoring, an interferometric product that detects ground movement of a few millimetres across tunnels, railways, dams and subsiding cities.

The company came out of ImPACT, a Cabinet Office national research programme, and the University of Tokyo laboratories that had spent years shrinking radar satellites, with JAXA contributing to the antenna. That inheritance shows in the customer list. Japan's Ministry of Defense selected Synspective as one of seven companies for its satellite constellation programme, and the constellation was tasked for emergency observation after the 2026 Kumamoto earthquake.

The constellation is behind. The original plan was thirty satellites by 2026; the target is now thirty by 2030, and ten were in orbit as of June 2026, each launched singly on a Rocket Lab Electron with roughly eighteen more flights still to fly. Revenue reached about ¥6.1 billion in 2025 against a modest net loss and a large order backlog, but the growth was attributed to defence and government deliveries and to subsidy income, so the analytics business that is meant to be the differentiator has not yet been shown to stand on its own. Sub-metre X-band radar is also no longer unusual. ICEYE, Capella, Umbra and iQPS all sell it, and ICEYE operates a far larger fleet. Since December 2024 the remaining buildout has had to be financed as a listed company.