Astranis has announced a $250 million Series C financing round, valuing the company at $1.4 billion.
The financing 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.
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. BofA Securities, Inc. acted as sole placement agent on this transaction.
Astranis states the company is solving one of the largest challenges facing the modern world, that being the reduction of the cost of internet access to get the next four billion people online.
The new funding will be used to significantly expand production of Astranis’s smallsat platform, built to satisfy the significant global demand for affordable broadband. Additionally, Astranis will accelerate new technology research and development to support its next-generation platforms. That includes the company’s proprietary, Software-Defined Radio (SDR) technology that 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. That’s in contrast to traditional satellites that 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.
Astranis has projects in work around the globe to deploy satellites to bring connectivity to some of the world’s most underserved areas.
“We are solving one of the biggest problems facing the world today,” said Astranis co-founder and CEO John Gedmark. “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.”