Hubble Network hits $2.3b valuation in $285m round

Satellite start-up Hubble Network has raised $US200 million ($285 million) at a $US1.6 billion ($2.3 billion) valuation, turning the Seattle-based company co-founded by Life360's Alex Haro into a unicorn, according to a report by technology reporter Emma Rapaport in the Australian Financial Review.

The later-stage round was led by a San Francisco-based venture capital firm established by the former co-chief executive of Salesforce. Long-time backer Carthona Capital, a Sydney early-stage venture firm, also participated.

Superannuation fund Hostplus is the major institutional investor in Carthona's $120 million 2022 Fund 3, which holds Hubble. That gives one of Australia's largest pension savers indirect exposure to one of the country's most valuable venture-backed space bets.

From $20 million to $1.6 billion in four years

Carthona has backed Hubble since its seed funding round in 2022, topping up in subsequent rounds. The firm first invested when the start-up was valued at just $US20 million, though its initial cheque was small. The previous round, in 2025, valued then pre-revenue Hubble at around $US300 million.

The relationship runs deeper than a term sheet. Hubble co-founder Alex Haro has known Carthona partner James Synge for more than two decades. Synge was the first investor in Haro's ASX-listed family location safety app Life360, where Haro remains a director.

"Carthona has probably looked at a dozen satellite or Internet-of-Things technology companies over the years," Synge told the AFR. "Our biggest issue with them was that you needed a base station, something on the ground to get the signal, which we thought was a big limiting factor, especially in places like Australia."

Hubble solved that problem. "When this came along, it's one of the few companies we've looked at where you didn't have to convince yourself of the total addressable market – any Bluetooth-enabled device anywhere in the world," Synge said.

Bluetooth in orbit

Haro co-founded Hubble in 2021, after taking Life360 public. The company's satellite network lets standard Bluetooth low-energy devices — the kind found in a mobile phone — collect and transmit data globally without cellular reception.

Haro concedes the claim strains credulity given how frustrating short-range Bluetooth audio can be. The problem, he says, is the volume of data ordinary Bluetooth tries to move at once.

"What we're solving at Hubble is about knowing where your assets are, collecting small amounts of data, like monitoring pipelines," he told the AFR.

Australia, with vast geography and patchy cellular coverage, should be an important market, Haro said. Hubble already runs a pilot with ASX-listed Brambles to track the logistics giant's millions of pallets with a cheap Bluetooth chip — useful when they are lost or stolen.

The chips can also report what a pallet carries and its condition, such as the ripeness of fruit. In agriculture, Hubble's technology can measure and transmit soil moisture data or the location of cattle.

The economics drive the case. "That just wasn't possible before with cellular-based trackers because they cost a minimum of $50, compared to a 50¢ Bluetooth-based tracker," Haro said.

Opening the network, diversifying launch providers

On Wednesday, Hubble announced it was opening its satellite network — currently six satellites in low Earth orbit — to the public. The company had relied on Elon Musk's SpaceX to launch its satellites, but is now in discussions with alternative providers, including New Zealand's Rocket Lab, as it works to expand to 60 satellites by 2030. SpaceX paused reservations for its Falcon 9 ride-share programme last month.

The launch-capacity constraint is the main execution risk between today's six-satellite constellation and the 60-satellite target.

For Carthona, Hubble is a third unicorn after Life360 and Nasdaq-listed lidar company Ouster. The firm says it has two more in its near-term pipeline.

The round signals that investors will still pay billion-dollar premiums for pre-revenue space infrastructure — provided the unit economics, in Hubble's case a 50-cent tracker versus a $50 cellular device, point to a mass market.