US-based satellite broadband specialist Astranis said it raised USD 250 million in a Series C financing round, valuing the company at USD 1.4 billion. The company will use the funds to scale to meet global demand for satellite broadband. The financing was led by funds managed by BlackRock, with significant participation from new investors Baillie Gifford, Fidelity Management & Research Company, Koch Strategic Platforms, Monashee Investment Management, and Uncorrelated Ventures.
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, SOMA Capital, and others also participated in the round.
The company will use the new funding to expand its microsatellite platform's production and accelerate new technology research and development to support its next-generation platforms. That 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 low cost and be built in months, not years. 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 where it’s needed.
