Hubble Network is the first company in history to establish a Bluetooth connection directly to a satellite – a critical technology validation for the company that potentially opens the door to connecting millions more devices around the world.
The Seattle-based startup launched its first two satellites into orbit in March as part of SpaceX’s Transporter-10 rideshare mission; The company has since confirmed that it has received signals from the integrated 3.5mm Bluetooth chips from over 600 kilometers away.
The sky is truly the limit when it comes to space-ready Bluetooth devices: The startup says its technology can be used in markets such as logistics, livestock tracking, smart collars for pets, GPS watches for children, car inventory, construction sites, and ground temperature monitoring. Haro said the low-hanging fruit is those industries that absolutely need network coverage once a day, such as remote asset monitoring in the oil and gas industry. As the constellation grows, Hubble will focus its attention on sectors that may require more frequent updates, such as ground monitoring, to continuous coverage use cases such as fall monitoring for the elderly.
Once operational, a customer simply needs to integrate their devices’ chipsets with firmware to enable connection to the Hubble network.
Hubble was founded in 2021 by Life360 co-founder Alex Haro, Iotera founder Ben Wild (who sold his startup to Ring), and aerospace engineer John Kim. Haro said that when Wild first presented the idea of connecting a Bluetooth chip to a satellite, his first reaction was, “Absolutely not.” And it sounds really crazy, especially since consumer electronics can have difficulty connecting to others Bluetooth-enabled devices that are only a few meters away.
But the demand is there: Existing IoT devices use a lot of power, are expensive to operate and lack global connectivity, the company says. These are fundamental limitations associated with Bluetooth-enabled devices today and are preventing many industries from leveraging the Internet of Things for their businesses.
The company joined Y Combinator’s winter 2022 cohort and closed $20 million in Series A financing last March. Hubble’s first innovation was to develop software that allowed commercially available Bluetooth chips to communicate over very long distances using low power.
In space, the company also patented a phased array antenna that can launch on a small satellite. The antennas work almost like a magnifying glass and enable a commercially available Bluetooth chip to communicate with the Hubble satellite. The team also had to solve Doppler-related problems. This causes frequency mismatches between fast-moving objects that exchange data via radio waves.
One of the Hubble satellites in a terrestrial test chamber.
Hubble plans to launch a third satellite on SpaceX’s Transporter-11 mission and a fourth on Transporter-13 this summer. Those four satellites will form what Haro called the “beta constellation,” and pilot customers are starting to activate their integrations today, he said. The startup plans to launch the following 32 satellites at once in the fourth quarter of 2025 or early 2026, although the launch provider has not yet been selected.
These 36 satellites will form Hubble’s first “production constellation,” providing connectivity to a Hubble satellite for approximately two to three hours per day from anywhere in the world.