Japan's Infostellar receives $7.3m Series A

Additional participation came from WERU Investment, D4V, Sony Innovation Fund, FreakOut Holdings and 500 Startups Japan. The capital will be used to launch the company’s flagship antenna platform known as StellarStation, as well as to expand its network of partner antennas and hire new staff.

"With the burgeoning number of low Earth orbit launches and the fast evolving criticality of data from space, supporting ground station networks are becoming hard pressed to keep up with satellite data demands - despite the irony that much of the time ground station antennas stand idle while other people's satellites pass overhead,” Lewis Pinault, Airbus’ managing investment partner in Japan, said in a statement. “Infostellar dramatically shifts the model - they can bring many hundreds of antennas around the globe to the service of thousands of satellites.”

Infostellar was founded last year with a view to improving the efficiency of communications infrastructure as part of the industry’s ongoing expansion in space.  According to James Riney, head of 500 Startups Japan, the company began as a concept to build an “Airbnb for satellite antennas.” StellarStation, which is slated to launch next month, will use a cloud-based platform during antennas’ idle time to lower the cost of transmissions while passing on revenue to infrastructure owners in the network.

Innovation in satellite communications technology has attracted significant venture capital interest in recent months, in part due to expectations that the infrastructure will be needed to support internet-of-things industry developments. Other activity in this space includes a A$5 million ($4 million) investment in Australian space technology start-up Fleet and a $75 million Series D for US and New Zealand-based aerospace company Rocket Lab.

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• Topics
• North Asia
• Technology
• Early-stage
• Japan
• 500 Startups
• Venture
• TMT