Hubble Network, a Seattle startup that connects ordinary Bluetooth chips directly to satellites, raised $200 million in a Series C round that values the company at $1.6 billion, the company said this week, as it opened its satellite network to general availability.
The round was led by Smith Point Capital, with participation from Seraphim, Carthona Capital, Earthshot Ventures, Y Combinator and RPM Ventures, bringing Hubble's total funding to $300 million. The company was founded in 2021 by chief executive Alex Haro, who previously co-founded the location-sharing app Life360, and chief technology officer Ben Wild, an inventor of Amazon's Sidewalk mesh network.
Hubble's pitch is that standard Bluetooth Low Energy radios — the kind already built into trackers, vehicles, pharmaceuticals and industrial equipment — can transmit directly to satellites after a firmware update, without new hardware, a cellular modem or a GPS chip. The company runs a hybrid network pairing roughly 90 million ground-based scanners with six satellites currently in low-Earth orbit, and says it plans to expand that constellation to 60 satellites by 2030 in partnership with satellite manufacturer Muon Space.
"When we said we'd connect Bluetooth chips to satellites, most of the industry said the physics wouldn't allow it. Today we're turning that early skepticism into a global opportunity."
Alex Haro, Hubble Network CEO
The company says the approach lets a $0.50 chip and a subscription costing a few dollars a month track a shipping container, a piece of livestock or a piece of industrial equipment anywhere on the planet, including in the ocean or remote terrain with no cellular coverage — use cases it points to in logistics, agriculture and cold-chain shipping. Software firm Samsara is running a pilot on the network, and Hubble has struck partnerships with chipmaker Texas Instruments and smart-label maker Reelables to build satellite connectivity into their products.
Competing with the satellite giants
The funding lands amid heavy investor interest in satellite-linked connectivity, an area also being pursued by SpaceX's Starlink and Amazon's Kuiper, both of which are building their own direct-to-device networks. Hubble is positioning itself as complementary to those efforts rather than competing head-on, arguing that its reliance on already-ubiquitous Bluetooth hardware — rather than new satellite-specific radios — gives it a faster path to scale across existing consumer and industrial devices. The company's next milestone will be visible in orbit: each new satellite added to its constellation is expected to shrink the delay between when a device transmits and when its location reaches a customer's dashboard.
