INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Jason Rowley
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Jason Rowley is a venture capital and technology reporter for Crunchbase News
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Old VC firms hold entrenched position in fundraising despite fresh entrants
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of tech Big Five: a look at MA deals
Smartphones have disrupted transportation, payments and communication
But the underlying technology has tangentially changed a completely different sector: satellites.
The advances made in miniaturizing
technologies that put a computer in your pocket — cameras, batteries, processors, radio antennas — have also made it easier and cheaper
for entrepreneurs to launch matter into space
And investors are taking notice.
The chart below shows worldwide venture and PE investment in satellite technology companies.
Venture
investment into satellite companies has been on a rocket-like trajectory since 2012, following a long fallow period
Although it isn&t pictured here, the last &major& satellite boom peaked in 2006, when there were five venture deals closed with satellite
companies worldwide, according to our data set.
Let take a look at some of the major players in the satellite sector
Below you can find a chart showing the most-funded private companies currently operating in the industry
We ranked them by total funding, which includes private equity rounds raised after traditional VC rounds (like seed, Series A,
etc.).
In general, these satellite companies are clustered around three different themes: broadband internet delivery, hardware
development and satellite-enabled services.
On the broadband front, we find a significant concentration of capital
It not just because internet connectivity is such a big market (it is), but it also takes a lot of capital to develop and deploy the
satellites needed to build a viable service network
That part of the reason whySoftBankinvested $1 billion ina $1.2 billion private equity roundraised byOneWebback in 2016.
In the world of
hardware and sensors, there a race toward miniaturization and efficiency both for spacefaring satellites and their terrestrial
endpoints.Kymeta, for example, has developed antenna technology that uses a holograph-like approach to acquire, steer and lock a beam to a
This helps objects which move quickly or make sharp turns maintain communication with a satellite.
As with much of the tech industry though,
it looks like a lot of money will be made from the services satellite hardware can facilitate.Planetdevelops and deploys its own array of
camera-equipped microsatellites, which regularly capture images of earth
It then sells generalized map and site-specific data feeds to governments, the financial sector, emergency readiness agencies, agriculture
Planet has some competitors, likeDescartes Labs,Orbital Insight,Astro Digital,OmniEarth and others, competing in the earth-imaging market
But because rich geospatial and imaging data is a relatively new market, there is likely plenty of demand to go around.
In reality, modern
satellite applications are more than the story of cheap electronics
Satellites (and the applications enabled by them) sit at the intersection of a number of cutting-edge technologies.
Without machine-taught
computer vision systems, it would be impossible to sort and classify the firehose of visual data some satellite networks produce
If there wasn&t such a boom in mobile communications and high-bandwidth applications like live-streaming video, there wouldn&t be as much
demand for new satellite technology
Without better and smaller sensors, a constellation of eyes in the sky would be limited to the visible light spectrum
If it weren&t for decades of public investment in rocketry and robotics, these little boxes of circuits and antennas would never leave
Earth.
But VCs and entrepreneurs don&t look to the past; instead, they want to know what satellites will do for the future and, eventually,
returns.
Methodology
Based on a slightly cleaned-up set of companies in Crunchbase&ssatellite communications categoryand others, which use
related keywords like &cubesat& and &nanosatellite,& we charted worldwide venture capital investment in satellite companies between 2012 and
We included angel, seed, convertible note and equity crowdfunding rounds, plus the standard-variety Series A, Series B and Series C
