Infostellar Raises New Investment

Tokyo, Japan, May 1, 2020- Infostellar has raised a total of US$ 3.5 million in convertible bonds with existing investors Airbus Ventures and Sony Innovation Fund, while welcoming new investors Daiwa Energy Infrastructure, Mitsubishi UFJ Capital, and Mitsubishi UFJ Lease & Finance. As a result, the cumulative amount of funds raised now reaches USD 11.5 million.

Infostellar is continuing to raise additional funds, and this round is scheduled to be closed by June 2020.

Since the last funding round in July 2017, Infostellar has developed StellarStation, a ground station platform for flexible and scalable satellite operations, and has verified the feasibility of satellite communication through sharing ground stations. We provide several satellite operators with an average of 500 passes per month through StellarStation. In addition, we have contracts with ground station owners in several countries around the world, including government owned ground stations. The total number of ground stations on the growing StellarStation network is 13.

The purpose of this finance round is to accelerate Infostellar’s business activities, specifically to hire business development and sales personnel and to strengthen Infostellar management. We will continue to develop our business activities throughout Europe and Asia, and provide satellite operators with a more flexible and expandable ground station network for full global deployment according to the company.

Infostellar is a Ground Segment as a Service (GSaaS) provider offering a highly flexible and scalable ground station services enabled by our cloud platform StellarStation which virtualises ground station networks. By lowering the barriers to entry in the ground segment, Infostellar empowers NewSpace businesses to build better missions and improve the quality of their service. Founded in 2016, Infostellar is headquartered in Tokyo, Japan and has its European office in the UK.

StellarStation is a flexible, scalable, satellite ground station platform. After a one-time setup, satellite operators can access any ground station across our global network. StellarStation also enables ground station owners to monetise their unused capacity by sharing it with satellite operators.

The sharing of the non-operating or ‘idle’ time of existing ground stations, which Infostellar has pioneered as part of the StellarStation network, is recognised by many satellite operators as an important and flexible asset for initial operations, backup, demonstrations of technology and business models, and added responsiveness for sudden demand. "We have also seen that there is an increasing demand from some satellite operators to reserve more passes, or satellite ground communication opportunities, in bulk. In order to continuously meet such demand, we are exploring initiatives to flexibly expand the ground station network through cooperation with Daiwa Energy Infrastructure, Mitsubishi UFJ Lease & Finance, and existing ground station partners," said Infostellar in a company statement.