Adelaide based Fleet Space Technologies—which is planning a network of nanosatellites for IoT applications—has raised $10.8 million from several global investors including Horizon Ventures, Momenta Ventures, Grok Ventures, existing investor Blackbird Ventures and the Kennard family, whose equipment hire company Kennards Hire, is a Fleet customer.
Fleet provides IoT connectivity via its satellites and a ground-based hub with edge computing capabilities that communicates with IoT endpoints using LoRaWAN.
It says the latest funding round introduces “strategic investors specifically chosen by Fleet to help develop its solutions to become even more powerful, and deploy it (sic) with the right network and technology partners.”
According to Fleet the contribution from Momenta Ventures is the first from its LPWAN Ecosystem Fund, billed as “the only Internet of Things-focused fund, established to accelerate industry solutions powered by low power wide area networks with a focus on open standards and ecosystems such as LoRaWAN.”
The Momenta web site says Momenta is investing in LPWAN because the global LPWAN market is forecast to grow to $US24b in 2021, a CAGR of 90 percent and because “LoRaWAN is the de facto standard complementing emerging 5G offerings.”
The web site shows one other investment by the LPWAN fund, in Kolmostar, billed as a positioning technology company that is reinventing the industry’s GNSS (GPS, Beidou, etc) positioning approach to achieve ultra-low-power (sub-mW) and high-precision (centimetre level) positioning in harsh metropolitan environments for Internet-of-Things devices and autonomous vehicles.”
Fleet has deployed its first four nanosatellites using SpaceX, Rocket Lab and Indian Space Research Organisation satellites. Its first commercial satellite, Centauri I, was launched by ISRO the and Centauri II by Space X in December 2016. Its two experimental satellites, Proxima I & II were launched by Rocket Labs a month earlier. Fleet says it is now building the next-generation of satellites for launch in the coming year.
