Hubble Network has raised a $200 million Series C at a $1.6 billion valuation. The Seattle startup connects ordinary Bluetooth chips directly to satellites, and it is now opening that coverage to every Bluetooth Low Energy device. Smith Point Capital led the round. Seraphim, Carthona Capital, Earthshot Ventures, Y Combinator and RPM Ventures joined. Total funding now stands at $300 million, a year after a $70 million Series B.
When Hubble started in 2021, a lot of people in the industry said a Bluetooth radio couldn’t reach orbit. CEO Alex Haro still likes to bring that up. “When we said we’d connect Bluetooth chips to satellites, most of the industry said the physics wouldn’t allow it,” he said.
A firmware update instead of a modem
The pitch is cost. Existing Bluetooth LE radios can become what Hubble calls “global beacons” through a firmware update. In new hardware, satellite connectivity adds less than 50 cents to the bill of materials. Hubble puts that at about 10 times cheaper than a cellular modem and roughly 50 times cheaper than dedicated satellite hardware. Service runs at around $4 a month per device.
The network has two layers. In orbit, Hubble has six low Earth orbit satellites today. It plans to reach 60 by 2030, built with Muon Space. On the ground, a terrestrial layer of more than 100 million gateways across 170 countries picks up signals where people and phones are nearby. The satellites cover everything else: oceans, farmland, mines and long stretches of highway with no cell signal.
More than 500,000 devices are active on the network, up tenfold in a year. Early partners give a sense of where this goes. Samsara is piloting it for remote equipment tracking. Texas Instruments is using it to move location and sensor data. InPlay is putting it into sub-$1 chips for item-level tracking. Reelables is building it into smart cargo labels.
Who is behind it
Haro co-founded Life360 and took it public. His co-founder Ben Wild invented and led Amazon Sidewalk, Amazon’s low-bandwidth neighborhood network for smart devices. Put those two backgrounds together and you get Hubble. It’s consumer-scale device tracking on a network that doesn’t need a cell tower.
The obvious market is logistics, meaning pallets, containers and rented equipment that go missing between depots. The bigger bet is that satellite reach becomes a default feature of cheap chips. At 50 cents, a lot of products that never had a connectivity budget suddenly do.