- Astranis — a company that is building the next-generation of telecommunications satellites — announced recently that it raised a $250 million Series C funding round at a $1.4 billion valuation. These are the details.
Astranis — a company that is building the next-generation of telecommunications satellites — announced recently that it raised a $250 million Series C funding round at a $1.4 billion valuation. This round of funding was led by funds managed by BlackRock, with significant participation from new investors Baillie Gifford, Fidelity Management & Research Company LLC, Koch Strategic Platforms, Monashee Investment Management, and Uncorrelated Ventures. And existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, Venrock, Fifty Years, ACE Early Stage Partners, Harpoon Ventures, Indicator Fund, Industry Ventures, Jaan Tallinn, Jeff Dean, Jerry Yang’s AME Cloud, Jude Gomila, Refactor Capital, Rising Tide Fund, and SOMA Capital, and others several others.
With this round of funding, the company will expand production of Astranis’s unique microsatellite platform, built to satisfy the significant global demand for affordable broadband. And Astranis will dramatically accelerate new technology research and development to support its next-generation platforms. This includes the company’s proprietary software-defined radio technology – which increases satellite performance and flexibility, and allows manufacturing at scale, lowering the price point to end-consumers.
Astranis’s satellites can be deployed at a lower cost and be built in months rather than years. Traditional satellites typically require hundreds of millions of dollars of capital and five or more years to get new capacity online. The smaller size of Astranis’s satellites — just 350 kg or about 20 times less than traditional satellites — and their deployment into geostationary orbit (GEO) allows Astranis to start providing coverage with just a single MicroGEO satellite and bring capacity online quickly, focusing beams of broadband connectivity right where it’s needed.
KEY QUOTE:
“We are solving one of the biggest problems facing the world today. Four billion people do not have reliable access to broadband internet. Getting connectivity to those who need it the most changes lives in a profound way. It empowers people to take control of their health, education, and economic situation. We’re talking about something that is now absolutely part of the base of the hierarchy of needs.” Astranis has projects in work around the globe to deploy satellites to bring connectivity to some of the world’s most underserved areas.”
— Astranis co-founder and CEO John Gedmark
