About us

An engineering team for space, industrial and technology software

IQ OVEL was founded in Zurich in 2016 to close a gap: data teams did not understand the physics, engineering firms did not build products. We do both.

Our story

The founders came from Earth observation, propulsion engineering and B2B software. The first engagement was a radar processing chain that cut a week of compute down to four hours. That produced the principle we still follow: solve the bottleneck first.

Today 34 people work from Zurich and Turin for space agencies, manufacturing suppliers and software vendors claiming a niche. We grow slowly and project-funded so that engineering quality is never traded for utilisation.

We publish our architecture decisions, speak at technical conferences and give tools back as open source. That is not marketing; it is the only way to stay credible in specialist markets.

What guides us

Measurement before opinion

Every claim about performance, accuracy or cost is measured and recorded. What we cannot measure, we do not promise.

Small teams, full ownership

Three to five people per project, from data model to on-call. No handover to an anonymous operations team.

Customer sovereignty

Open formats, documented interfaces, no artificial lock-in. You must be able to leave at any time — that is why you stay.

Longevity

We build for ten years of operation: conservative technology choices, high test coverage, few dependencies.

The people accountable

You always know who is working on your system and who carries technical responsibility for it.

Dr Lena Hofstetter

Co-founder, Head of Earth Observation

PhD in remote sensing, seven years building processing chains for optical missions. Owns geospatial architecture and model validation.

Marc Aubry

Head of Industrial Systems

Automation engineer with fifteen years of plant engineering in France and Germany. Bridges the PLC world and cloud operations.

Giulia Ferrante

Head of Product & Vertical SaaS

Took two niche platforms from zero to market maturity. Owns discovery, pricing models and the onboarding experience.

Tobias Renner

Head of Platform & Security

Critical infrastructure operations, ISO 27001 audit experience. Owns operations, hardening and continuity planning.

Assurances and operating framework

Information security management system certified to ISO/IEC 27001
Data processing under GDPR and the revised Swiss Data Protection Act
Data centres in Zurich, Geneva and Frankfurt; on-premise installations available
Reference calls with existing customers on request

See the projects Describe your project

How we work together

What an engagement with IQ OVEL looks like in practice, from first enquiry to operations.

Who works with us

Our clients are space agencies and constellation operators, manufacturing suppliers, energy and infrastructure companies, and software vendors claiming a technical niche. What they share is a strong internal team without the capacity or product-building experience to ship on their own.

Space: ground segment, mission planning, data processing
Industry: maintenance, quality, energy and equipment data
Technology: product build-out, platform migration, scaling

Contracts, pricing and collaboration

We start with a paid fixed-price scoping phase, then iterate on time and materials or fixed price per stage. You can stop after any phase and keep all rights to what has been delivered.

Collaboration happens in your language — German, French, Italian or English — remotely or on site in Zurich and Turin. For defence and infrastructure work we use vetted staff and segregated environments.