- Hubble Network raised $200 million to open its Bluetooth-to-satellite network to the public.
- The round values the five-year-old startup at $1.6 billion, more than double its last raise.
- Smith Point Capital led the round as devices on its network grew tenfold in a year.
Alex Haro spent years hearing the same objection: physics wouldn’t let a Bluetooth chip, the same kind sitting in a pair of wireless earbuds, talk to a satellite hundreds of kilometres up. Five years after founding Hubble Network to prove otherwise, the Seattle startup has more than 500,000 devices reporting in from orbit, and it just raised $200 million to make that the everyday standard rather than the party trick.
Hubble was founded in 2021 by Haro and Ben Wild. Haro previously co-founded Life360, the family-safety app built around Bluetooth item tracking. Wild spent time at Amazon, where he invented and led product for Amazon Sidewalk, the retailer’s low-power wireless mesh network.
Its headcount has grown to more than 70, up from roughly ten people testing satellite hardware on a bench in Hubble’s early days.
The $200 million Series C was led by Smith Point Capital, a three-year-old enterprise-software investor better known for backing AssemblyAI and Bestow than satellite hardware, with Carthona Capital, Earthshot Ventures, RPM Ventures, Seraphim, and Y Combinator returning. A LinkedIn post from a Smith Point director also names Pioneer Fund as one of the backers.
The round brings Hubble’s total funding to $300 million and pushes its valuation to $1.6 billion, up sharply from its $70 million Series B, which closed in September 2025 and had brought total funding to $100 million at the time. The new capital will fund Hubble’s satellite constellation, expanding from six spacecraft today to 60 by 2030.
A software update instead of a satellite modem
The startup, founded to solve a coverage problem rather than a hardware one, works by turning the Bluetooth Low Energy radio already built into billions of devices into a satellite uplink.
A firmware update lets an existing product report its location or sensor readings from the roughly 85% of Earth’s landmass that sits outside cellular coverage. Reaching that territory has traditionally meant bolting on dedicated satellite hardware, adding at least $25 to a device’s cost.
Hubble says its approach adds under 50 cents to the bill of materials, about a tenth of the cost of a cellular modem and a fiftieth of the cost of a satellite modem. A shipping container or piece of remote farm equipment that already carries a Bluetooth sensor, for example, can be tracked without adding a single new component.
“We’re turning that early skepticism into a global opportunity,” Haro said.
Chris Lytle, co-founder and managing director at Smith Point Capital, put the firm’s rationale in a LinkedIn post explaining the investment: “Our conviction in Hubble comes from its foundational technology, growing ecosystem advantage.”
Sateliot, Skylo and the race to reach off-grid devices
Hubble isn’t alone in chasing the gap cellular networks leave behind.
Sateliot, a Barcelona-based operator, secured a €30 million EIB loan to expand its nanosatellite constellation and route IoT data over standard 5G networks. Skylo Technologies raised $30 million to extend direct-to-device satellite links to smartphones, vehicles, and industrial sensors. Swarm Technologies, now owned by SpaceX, sells its own dedicated satellite modem for similar use cases.
Where those rivals ask customers to add new hardware or route through mobile-network partners, Hubble’s pitch is that nothing changes at the device level: the radio is already there.
More than 500,000 devices are active on Hubble’s terrestrial network, a tenfold jump from a year earlier, spread across more than 100 million gateways in 170 countries. Samsara, the connected-operations software company, is piloting the satellite service.
“Reliable connectivity can be hard to come by,” said David Gal, Samsara’s vice president of product and engineering for connected equipment. Hubble has also partnered with Texas Instruments, InPlay, and Reelables, and signed Muon Space as its first customer for larger next-generation satellites.
A satellite IoT market racing to keep up with demand
The wider satellite IoT market is expanding fast enough to support several competing approaches at once. Fortune Business Insights values the global satellite IoT market at $2.01 billion in 2025 and projects it to reach $6.51 billion by 2034, with direct-to-device connections expected to account for 68.84% of the market in 2026 alone.
Hubble’s vision is that the cheapest route to space is the billions of Bluetooth chips already sitting in warehouses, wearables and shipping containers. Whether that undercuts satellite-native rivals or just carves out a cheaper tier underneath them is the question its next 54 satellites will have to answer.
