At a broadcast trailer parked outside a stadium, the wireless microphone clipped to a presenter's lapel is one of the most fragile pieces of equipment in the production. Bodies absorb radio waves. Sweat detunes antennas. A presenter who turns the wrong way can drop a signal at the worst possible second. AntennaWare, a four-year-old spinout from Queen's University Belfast, has built its company around fixing exactly that problem, and it is starting to win deals from the audio brands that care most.
The Belfast firm sells a product line called BodyWave, a family of wearable antennas engineered to keep wireless links stable when the device sits on, or near, a human body [AntennaWare, March 2025]. The company also offers matching network, transmission line, and RF circuitry design services to customers integrating the antennas into their own hardware [AntennaWare]. The pitch is narrow and technical. It is also the kind of pitch that tends to travel well in deeptech: a measurable performance gap, a defensible piece of physics, and a customer base that already knows it has the problem.
The bet
AntennaWare's wedge is professional audio, with adjacent expansion into ultra-wideband (UWB) and Sub-GHz industrial IoT. In September 2024, the company announced a partnership with Raycom to launch a Sub-GHz BodyWave antenna for professional sound engineers [Mixonline, September 2024]. Raycom's commercial director Andy Clements described BodyWave as a fit for production workflows that cannot afford dropouts. CEO Gareth Conway, in the same announcement, framed the deal around "prestigious, mission critical but often challenging audio acquisition scenarios" [Mixonline, September 2024].
The Raycom deal is not the only one. Hollyland is preparing a wireless intercom system featuring BodyWave technology [AntennaWare]. Audio Codecs and Virscient have launched a Bluetooth Low Energy module called Skylark that incorporates AntennaWare's design work [AntennaWare]. On the UWB side, the company is listed as a partner in Qorvo's ultra-wideband ecosystem [Qorvo]. That is a meaningful signal: Qorvo is one of the larger RF semiconductor vendors, and its UWB partner roster is a route to chipset-level integrations that AntennaWare could not easily build on its own.
The company claims its antennas deliver up to 20dB of additional gain in wearable scenarios [AntennaWare blog]. That figure is company-disclosed and the strongest version of the pitch, but in RF terms, even a fraction of that improvement is the difference between a usable link and a dead one.
Why it could be big
Wearable wireless is a category that keeps widening. UWB is now standard in flagship smartphones and is moving into industrial tracking, automotive access, and audio. Wi-Fi HaLow, a Sub-GHz standard, is pushing into long-range IoT. Bluetooth LE Audio is rewiring the assistive-listening and pro-audio markets. Every one of those standards has the same physical problem the moment the radio touches a person: the human body is a bag of saltwater that detunes antennas and absorbs signal.
AntennaWare's investor base reflects the bet that this is a hardware IP business worth backing early. The 2023 seed round was led by QUBIS, the commercialisation arm of Queen's University Belfast, with participation from Techstart Ventures, Invent Awards, and Clarendon Fund Managers [Newsletter.co.uk]. The round was reported as a six-figure investment [Newsletter.co.uk]. That is modest capital by deeptech standards, but it is consistent with a company whose go-to-market relies on design-in deals with larger OEMs rather than on building its own consumer brand.
| Round | Year | Lead | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Seed (six-figure) | 2023 | QUBIS | Newsletter.co.uk |
The team and the traction
Co-founder and CEO Gareth Conway and co-founder Matthew Magill bring what the company describes as more than 22 years of collective experience in wearable technology [Queen's University Belfast]. Magill holds a PhD in antenna design and electromagnetic propagation for body-centric wireless communications, and was previously a Research Fellow at Queen's University Belfast [AntennaWare]. His academic work on wearable and implantable antennas is the foundation of the BodyWave product line [AntennaWare].
The recognition has followed. AntennaWare won Equity-Backed StartUp of the Year at the 2024 Northern Ireland StartUp Awards [UK StartUp Awards, 2024], and was named Innovative Startup of the Year at the UK Startup Awards [AntennaWare]. Awards are not revenue, but in a category where buyers want to see institutional validation before designing a third-party antenna into their bill of materials, they help open doors.
What the bears say, and what the bulls answer
The most credible concern is structural: AntennaWare is a small Belfast hardware-IP company selling into RF supply chains dominated by very large semiconductor and component vendors. Competition in wearable wireless is intense, and OEMs have a long history of building antennas in-house once volumes justify it. The bull answer is in the partner list. Raycom, Hollyland, Virscient, and Qorvo are not customers a hobbyist wins. They are companies that have evaluated the BodyWave performance claims against their own engineering benchmarks and chosen to ship product with the technology inside [Mixonline, September 2024; AntennaWare; Qorvo]. Design-in wins of that kind tend to be sticky, because re-spinning an RF front end is expensive and risky.
What to watch
The next twelve months will turn on three things. First, whether the Hollyland intercom system and the Raycom Sub-GHz product translate early partnerships into recurring shipments. Second, whether the Qorvo UWB partnership produces a reference design that puts BodyWave in front of the broader UWB integrator base. Third, whether AntennaWare raises a larger follow-on round to fund the engineering headcount needed to support multiple OEM design-ins simultaneously. The 2023 seed was sized for proof, not scale [Newsletter.co.uk].
For a company selling physics into a market that has tolerated bad antennas for decades, the opening is real. The question for readers: when UWB and Wi-Fi HaLow start shipping in volume on bodies, gates, and machines, does the antenna become the part nobody thinks about, or the part everyone specifies by name?
Cash Quintero, Startuply