Scaling Multi-Orbit Connectivity
Feb 17, 2026
Kymeta and Japan Display Inc (JDI) are teaming up to produce what both companies say is the first terminal of its kind — a metasurface antenna built to handle Ku- and Ka-band satellite signals through a single device. The announcement came on February 4, 2026, and caps off a busy stretch for Kymeta, which spent much of 2025 pushing its core technology past a number of engineering barriers at its Redmond, Washington headquarters. For the company, this deal is less about research and more about getting hardware into customers’ hands at scale.
Credit: Kymeta
Back in April 2025, Kymeta put its prototype through a live test that caught the industry’s attention. The antenna managed to send and receive Ka-band and Ku-band signals at the same time — four streams running concurrently through a single aperture. Rick Bergman, who led the company at the time, said this was something the industry had wanted for a long time, describing it as the capability that defense and commercial customers kept asking for but nobody had delivered. Under the hood, four sub-arrays split the work — two for Ku-band and two for Ka-band, each handling transmit and receive separately — while AI software decides in real time where each data stream goes. The metamaterial core of the antenna also lets it lock onto both LEO and GEO satellites without swapping hardware, which is what makes the multi-orbit piece work in practice.
Satellite connectivity has over the years implied choosing a network and remaining on it. Bergman clarified that this was the fundamental issue Kymeta was trying to resolve, adding that there is no need to select networks as a smartphone user selects cell towers. The defense case is quite simple: classified systems are frequently operated using GEO satellites due to security concerns, and LEO constellations provide the low latency and raw throughput that contemporary operations require. A single antenna which does both eliminates a significant logistical nightmare. Bruno Fromont, CTO at Intelsat, made it very clear — one mobile antenna bridging Ku- and Ka-band is the sort of thing that will turn satellite links into a less specialized domain and more of an infrastructure that is used every day. All this did not just come out of the blue. This was precisely the requirement specified by the U.S. Space Force in a 2020 whitepaper, which demanded terminals capable of operating on a variety of bands, orbits, and waveforms.
JDI was chosen as the manufacturing partner because of its background in flat-panel thin film transistor production — a process that maps well onto the kind of precision, high-volume output Kymeta needs. Manny Mora, who now runs Kymeta as President and CEO, said the company has spent years getting the technology right and is now focused on turning it into a product line. The first target is a Ku/Ka terminal for defense platforms and autonomous systems, with supply chain security treated as a non-negotiable given the end users involved. Mora also made clear that the company isn’t limiting itself to military buyers — enterprise connectivity and autonomous vehicles are both on the roadmap, especially in scenarios where signals get jammed or degraded and the system needs to shift frequencies without any human input. That kind of automatic fallback is quickly becoming something buyers expect rather than something they pay extra for.
