UNIVITY has raised €27M ($31.6M) Series A to continue building its connectivity demo in VLEO.
Blast Club and Expansion Venture Capital contributed to the round, which also included support from the Deep Tech fund managed by Bpifrance.
UNIVITY 101: The company believes it offers two benefits compared with other in-space connectivity companies.
- Operating closer to Earth in VLEO at ~375 km, which offers lower latency and better performance.
- Using 5G spectrum, to make sure services work with existing mobile networks.
Big plans: The French startup will use the funding to:
- Grow its workforce;
- Conduct uniShape, its 5G connectivity demo mission in VLEO using two sats.
“These two VLEO 5g satellites will complete our de-risking phase of the project, by testing end-to-end all our software and hardware…paving the ground for the third and last step of our roadmap that consists of deploying at scale,” Charles Delfieux, the president and founder of UNIVITY, told Payload.
What’s next: The demo is intended to set up Univity’s launch into commercial operations in 2028 with its uniSky constellation—a several-billion-Euro investment that will include up to 3,400 satellites, Delfieux said. The company’s long-term goal is to build two sats per day, which can be launched in batches of 30 roughly once a month.
“We will manage our launch frequency in such a way that at the end of the seven-year cycle, we start replenishing the first orbital plane,” Delfieux said.
Douglas Gorman contributed to this report.
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