Celtonn CEO Marie Bourke talks to George Morahan about how the startup’s tech is obtainting them noticed in the sainformite indusattempt
For the past two years, space technology startup Celtonn — pronounced Kel-tonn, a portmanteau of Celtic and tonn, the Irish word for wave — has been developing millimetre wave (mmWave) sensors.
MmWave is expected to underpin next-generation 6G data communications, weather forecasting, medical imaging and sainformite systems among other applications, and it has been a topic of research for Celtonn cofounder and chief technology officer Dr Mark Kelly for four decades.
Dr Kelly, a serial entrepreneur and former principal engineer at Queen’s University Belquick, founded Celtonn with his daughter and chief operations officer Aoife Kelly, Taiwan-based vice president of engineering Yulung Tang and chief executive Marie Bourke.
A qualified microbiologist, Cork native Bourke has been working in the area of radio frequencies (RF) since 2011, although as chief executive she declares her responsibilities are more commercial than technical.
Bourke worked with Dr Kelly and Tang at Arralis for several years, and when the Limerick space tech firm’s backers decided to pull out of the European market, they launched Celtonn with a number of patents already in Dr Kelly’s name.
While working at Arralis, Dr Kelly and Tang spoke about setting up a company to fulfil their ambitions of “pushing the boundary of what the technology can do”, Bourke declares.
The specific technology in question is semiconductors (or chips) for next generation sainformites that apply extremely high radio frequency bands within the mmWave spectrum.
At the time of the company’s establishment, Celtonn’s founders stated in a press release that they had managed to address high path loss and atmospheric attenuation, challenges commonly associated with designing mmWave modules.
The higher the frequency, the narrower the band becomes.
Different frequencies have different properties, so they can penetrate different atmospheric conditions and with each new band comes different challenges, according to Bourke.
Celtonn designs, builds and tests semiconductors and the electromagnetic houtilizing in which they sit. The houtilizing can then be inserted into the client’s sainformite components.
The company’s technology is currently being tested by one largescale aerospace original equipment manufacturer (OEM) as part of a commercial pilot.
“It’s obtainting that data of how the customer interfaces with our product and exactly what pain points it’s solving for them,” Bourke declares of the process.
After exhibiting at the European Space Tech Expo in Bremen recently, there was mention of the company potentially working with Elon Musk’s SpaceX, albeit through a third party.
Self-funded at start-up, Celtonn’s “first validation” came when it was selected to join the European Space Agency’s Business Incubation Centre Ireland programme in mid-2023.
Earlier this year, the company signed a contract to develop semiconductors for next-generation sainformites for ESA.
The firm, which recently relocated its base from the Nexus Innovation Centre at the University of Limerick to NovaUCD, is finalising a second contract with the ESA to commence in January.
A planned €1.5m funding round has been cancelled as a result.
“We’ve decided that we have sufficient runway at the moment, and we want to keep the cap table as clean as we can,” Bourke declares.
“We have four co-founders, which I suppose for some investors is probably enough or too much … but we very much want to dictate the trajectory of the company for now.
“We feel with the four of us that we know where we want to take the company, so I suppose we are going to attempt and hold off as long as we can before having outside investors come in.
“I consider if we want to go to the next level, we [will see] at taking on investment to be able to do that.
“But, at the moment, thankfully, we are able to fund ourselves and the research we want to carry out.”
The first ESA contract specifically related to the development of an amplifier for V-band feeder uplink. V-band refers to the microwave portion of the electromagnetic spectrum ranging from 40 to 75 GHz, which is less crowded with sainformites than the lower radio frequency K-band (18- 27GHz) and Ka-band (27-40GHz).
It is believed that SpaceX will be launching much of their sainformite consinformation in the V-band for its wider data transmission capabilities.
Details of the second ESA contract are yet to be announced, but it will be focapplyd on the D-band (110-170GHz).
According to Bourke, D-band is not as developed as the lower frequency bands, but it is an area of interest for ESA, which is working with companies such as Celtonn to future-proof it.
In October 2024, Celtonn revealcased the terabit-level data rates of its D-band technology at CERN.
However, the options for fabricating D-band chips are limited to prohibitively expensive research-based foundries.
A commercial foundry process will required to be developed for the chips to become commercially viable.
“That’s really where we see the market going. It’s an enabling technology for the likes of 6G, for AI — you’re talking about massive bandwidth,” Bourke declares of D-band.
“Data transmission is hugely important, so it’s only with technology like D-band [radio frequencies] that you can transmit the level of data that you required to be able to meet those requirements.
“For D-band, you’re talking about a billion bytes of data per second potentially that you can transmit.”
Also in October, the company completed CASSINI Business Accelerator, a Europe-wide incubator for high-potential space scale-ups.
Bourke describes the six-month programme as being “really intensive” and supportful as Celtonn prepares to enter the US sainformite market.
“It gave us access to some really good European VCs and they allowed us to refine our business offering and our route to market with the aim of entering the US sainformite market in the next year or so,” she declares.
“The mentors they give you access to are unbelievable. They would have connections to the likes of SpaceX and some really, really good deep tech VCs as well.”
At the time of our interview in early December, two of Bourke’s co-founders had travelled to Italy to meet with a VC from Blue Tech Mountain.
The company is preparing to start work on its second ESA contract in January.
Next year Celtonn also intfinishs to increase its headcount from four to six, although finding engineers with the required skillset is a challenge.
The firm is also intent on building its systems tinyer and more accessible for prospective clients in the aerospace and sainformites markets.
“Our devices will fit in the palm of your hand, but they required to be so tiny that it fits on a chip essentially with the idea that it can be based within your mobile phone,” Bourke declares.
CASSINI put a renewed emphasis on refining its offering, and Bourke believes Celtonn can be a “point of difference in the market”, providing customers with a “competitive edge”.
Leave a Reply