Can You Hear Me Now…?
Mangata Networks aims to transform how the world interacts with information
Promus Ventures is excited to invest in Mangata Network’s $33M Series A round, which was announced by Mangata Networks earlier this week. Mangata aims to transform the way the world interacts with information, and will offer unprecedented connectivity through the novel system architecture the team is developing.
Promus Ventures co-invested alongside Playground Global, Temasek, and a number of strategic investors. We believe this strong and diversified investor syndicate will be a very important enabler for Mangata, providing support across multiple areas ranging from financial to operational and execution help as the company scales.
Why Satellite Communications?
Depending on who you ask, the size of the space sector is somewhere between $200B and $450B annually, and could be on track to be a trillion-dollar industry sometime in the next couple of decades [1]. Sub-segments like launch and the government-driven exploration programs generate most of the excitement and capture the public’s attention, but these are actually relatively small when measured against the size of the total market. The vast majority of the activity in the space sector is in the satellite communications sub-segment, which is currently estimated to generate $150B-$200B a year.
Satellite communications constellations provide everything from the satellite TV signal to a consumer home, to highly-secure low-latency communications links for government/defense use cases. Compared to terrestrial networks, satellite-based communication can provide compelling connectivity when there are constraints in terms of coverage, resilience, and other factors.
At the same time new cases for ubiquitous connectivity are emerging. There will be increased demand for bandwidth from autonomous transportation, the Internet of Things, artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and mobile video.
This should not be a surprise to anyone who has tracked the development and proliferation of communications since the first computer and mobile networks were deployed — data has always expanded to fill all available bandwidth. We firmly believe that this trend will continue, and that demand for bandwidth will keep growing at ever increasing rates.
The size of these existing and emerging markets has caught the interest of leading companies and entrepreneurs — many of whom are looking to disrupt legacy geostationary/geosynchronous satellite constellations with new approaches.
SpaceX is actively deploying satellites for its low earth orbit (LEO) Starlink communications constellation, and Amazon plans to start launching satellites into LEO for its Kuiper communications constellation in the near future. Similarly, a number of other companies like OneWeb and Telesat are working on LEO constellations, and satellite communications incumbents are developing novel constellations.
Why Mangata Networks?
While these new entrants and legacy companies will provide strong competition, we believe that there is still incredible opportunity to create and capture value in the sector. We have been actively evaluating companies developing products across the satellite communications value chain, and feel Mangata is well positioned to carve out a leading role in the industry.
The vision the team has for an integrated communications offering that scales seamlessly from satellite coverage to terrestrial networks will be compelling for many existing markets such as government, in-flight connectivity, and maritime, and also be an enabler for emerging use cases such as the connected autonomous car.
We have been very impressed by the founding team, and believe that they are likely the only startup team in the world to have successfully architected two previous non-geostationary (NGSO) communications constellations, given their early involvement with both O3B and OneWeb.
We are excited to partner with Brian and the rest of the Mangata team, and look forward to helping them build a communications constellation for the future.
[1] https://www.morganstanley.com/ideas/investing-in-space
[2] https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/solutions/executive-perspectives/annual-internet-report/index.html
Promus Ventures invests in early-stage deep tech startups solving complex problems to advance everyday lives across the world. Some of Promus Ventures’ other leading portfolio investments include Rocket Lab (Nasdaq: RKLB), Whoop, Spire (NYSE: SPIR), Mapbox, ICEYE, Bellabeat, Swift Navigation, AngelList, Behavox, Gauss Surgical, Figure Eight, Isotropic Systems, Halter, Cobalt, Safehub, and numerous others.
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