Spire Global Switzerland

Spire Global's Swiss operations, based in Chavannes-près-Renens near Lausanne in the canton of Vaud, house one of the company's three primary satellite manufacturing facilities — alongside Luxembourg and San Francisco — where Spire designs, builds, integrates, and tests its LEMUR-2 nanosatellites that form the core of its 110+ satellite LEO constellation providing global weather, maritime tracking, and aviation tracking data services.

Spire Global (NYSE: SPIR) established its Swiss manufacturing operations to access European engineering talent and benefit from the ecosystem around EPFL (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne), one of Europe's premier technical universities. The Lausanne region is a hub for precision manufacturing, photonics, and sensor technology companies whose supply chains feed Spire's satellite production. Swiss manufacturing also positions Spire advantageously for European government contracts and ESA partnerships, as European space agencies and defense customers often prefer European supply chains.

The LEMUR-2 satellites are 3U cubesats (approximately 3 kg each) carrying multiple payloads: GNSS Radio Occultation (GPS-RO) receivers that measure atmospheric refraction of GPS/GNSS signals as satellites rise and set behind Earth's limb, generating atmospheric profile data used by NOAA, ECMWF, and commercial weather forecast models; AIS (Automatic Identification System) receivers for maritime vessel tracking that detect ship position broadcasts globally, providing vessel location data for maritime domain awareness and fleet management; and ADS-B (Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast) receivers for aviation tracking that collect aircraft position data from transponders, providing global flight tracking coverage including oceanic routes where radar coverage is unavailable.

Spire's Swiss facility contributes satellites to all three data product lines, providing Spire with diversified revenue from weather data licensing, maritime analytics subscriptions, and aviation data services. Spire's manufacturing across three continents also provides resilience against disruption at any single site and access to different talent pools for specialized engineering roles.