Astranis raises $450m new capital for GEO spacecraft

It brings the company’s total raised to $1.2 billion. The funding includes a $300 million Series E round co-led by Snowpoint Ventures and Franklin Templeton. Also participating were Andreessen Horowitz, BlackRock, Baillie Gifford, and Fidelity Management & Research Company.

It describes its MicroGEO satellites as “small, powerful satellites for high orbits”.

Volatile

Astranuis highlighted the current fraught geo-political situation, for context.

“The world is more contested and volatile than it once was,” said its co-founder and CEO, John Gedmark. “Sovereign, secure communications infrastructure is more critical than ever.”

“We built Astranis to deliver satellites at speed and at scale. This capital accelerates our ability to meet demand from our commercial customer base around the world, and importantly we are now spooling up to support multiple US Government programs of record simultaneously.”

Prospects

The company flagged that it has been selected for the initial phase for multiple separate US Department of War Programs of Record as a Prime. These include the Protected Tactical Satcom-Global (PTS-G), Resilient GPS, and Andromeda programmes.

Astranis says the capital injection comes as dedicated communications infrastructure is increasingly a strategic asset for large enterprises and governments. It says it is seeing demand from customers accelerating their shift away from ageing, shared GEO communications satellites toward dedicated satellites and networks they control.

For example, the company has announced satellite projects with customers including Chunghwa Telecom in Taiwan (pictured right). And also MB Group in Oman, which is set to launch later this year.

Note that there is also a delayed-draw credit facility by Trinity Capital. This adds up to $155 million of additional capital to support new manufacturing capacity, said Astranis.

MicroGEO

Astranis launched its first MicroGEO satellite in 2023, dubbed Arcturus, pictured above. Since then, four more are in orbit.

The MicroGEO uses a proprietary SDR (software-defined radio). It allows the reallocation of bandwidth and power on the fly, across 7 GHz of bandwidth.

Images: Astranis

See also: SWISSto12 opens assembly facility for GEO satellites in Switzerland