U-blox

u-blox is a Swiss company that creates wireless semiconductors and modules for consumer, automotive and industrial markets. They operate as a fabless IC and design house.

u-blox Holding AG

Company type	Public
Traded as	SIX: UBXN
Industry	Semiconductors, Internet of Things (IoT)
Founded	1997
Headquarters	Thalwil, canton of Zürich, Switzerland
Key people	Stephan Zizala (CEO) André Müller (Chairman)
Revenue	SFr 262.9 million (2021)[1]
Operating income	SFr 121.8 million (2021)[2]
Net income	SFr 101.8 million (2021)[2]
Number of employees	850 (2025)[3]
Website	www.u-blox.com

Listed at the Swiss Stock Exchange (SIX:UBXN), it has offices in the US, Singapore, China, Taiwan, Korea, Japan, India, Pakistan, Australia, Ireland, the UK, Belgium, Germany, Sweden, Finland, Italy and Greece.

History

Based in Thalwil, Switzerland, u-blox is a spin-off of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH)^[4][5] and was founded in 1997. Thomas Seiler served as CEO for two decades until his retirement on December 31, 2022, when his position was taken over by Stephan Zizala.^[6]

In 2016, the company opened a new office in Taipei, Taiwan.^[7] On November 26, 2025, three months after agreeing to buy it for $1.3 billion,^[8] it was announced that the private equity firm Advent International had completed the acquisition of the company.^[9]

Products and technology

u-blox provides starter kits which allow quick prototyping of variety of applications for the Internet of Things.^[10] It develops and sells chips and modules that support global navigation satellite systems (GNSS), including receivers for GPS, GLONASS, Galileo, BeiDou and QZSS.^[11] The wireless range consists of GSM-, UMTS- and CDMA2000 and LTE modules, as well as Bluetooth- and WiFi-modules. All these products enable the delivery of complete systems for location-based services and M2M applications (machine-to-machine communication) in the Internet of Things, that rely on the convergence of 2G/3G/4G, Bluetooth-, Wi-Fi technology and satellite navigation.^[12] A collaboration to create GNSS receiver that work globally was started between u-blox, SoftBank and ALES in 2021.^[13] One year later, in 2022, u-blox released the at the time smallest LTE Cat 4 Module LARA-L6.^[14] The company launched a dual-band GNSS module in 2023 that uses the L1 as well as the L5 GPS frequency bands.^[15] In 2024 u-blox released the LEXI-R10, which was, according to the company, the smallest LTE Cat 1bis module at time of launch.^[16][17]

Acquisitions

They acquired a dozen companies after their IPO in 2007, after acquiring connectblue^[18] in 2014 and Lesswire in 2015 ^[19] they acquired Rigado's module business in 2019.^[20] In 2020, u-blox acquired Thingstream.^[21] In 2021, u-blox AG acquired Sapcorda Services GmbH, a provider of high precision GNSS (global navigation satellite system) services.^[22] and Naventik GmbH, a German company specializing in the development of safe positioning solutions for autonomous driving.^[23]