PION Labs

PION Labs (legally PION Labs Engenharia Ltda.) is a private Brazilian aerospace engineering company founded on December 16, 2019, in São Paulo by engineers Calvin Souto Trubiene, Gabriel Lopes Yamato, and João Pedro Vilas Boas Silva. Its mission is to make space "accessible for everyone," with a strategic focus on low-cost IoT/M2M satellite connectivity for remote and rural applications, and on building Latin America's space-sector talent pipeline through hands-on education.

The company's early technical milestone was the 2019 flight of the Quark hybrid-propellant sounding rocket, validating remote cryogenic oxidizer loading, remote ignition, and telemetry. In January 2022, PION became the first Brazilian startup to place its own satellite in orbit: PION-BR1, a 1P PocketQube technology demonstrator launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 (Transporter-3 rideshare) from Cape Canaveral, carrying a digital store-and-forward messaging payload developed with the Federal University of São Carlos (UFSCar).

On December 8, 2023, PION conducted the first launch entirely by a Brazilian startup from Brazilian soil (the PESL sounding rocket from the Barreira do Inferno Launch Center), including Brazil's first rocket-recovery operation. In 2025, PION partnered with the Federal University of Maranhão on PION-BR2, a 1U CubeSat flown on the inaugural HANBIT-Nano rocket from the Alcântara Launch Center — Brazil's first commercial orbital launch attempt from domestic soil.

Beyond flight hardware, PION Labs is a major player in Latin American space STEM education, organizing the Latin American Space Challenge (LASC) — described as the region's largest rocket/satellite engineering competition — and offering CanSat and CubeSat educational kits through its PION Classroom learning platform, certified by Brazil's MCTI Brazilian Satellite Olympiad (OSBAT).