Kymeta Corp. — the satellite antenna venture that’s based in Redmond, Wash., and backed by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates — has extended its reach into the service side of the satellite industry by acquiring Lepton Global Solutions.
Executives for the two companies said the move should strengthen their hand as they pursue contracts for government and military communications systems.
“Having a turnkey satellite service provider like Lepton accelerates Kymeta’s ability to successfully penetrate U.S. military and government customers in partnership with a well-established brand, deep channel experience and network support for those verticals,” Walter Berger, Kymeta’s president and chief operating officer, said today in a news release.
Rob Weitendorf, managing partner at Lepton, said he was excited to become part of Kymeta’s corporate family.
“We think the Kymeta antenna has changed the satellite marketplace, especially in the mobility world inside the government, whether it be for the U.S. Army or Coast Guard, or the Border Patrol or the U.S. Forest Service,” he told GeekWire. “The need for connectivity in the government marketplace has never been stronger.”
Weitendorf said Kymeta should now be well-positioned to take advantage of Lepton’s communications network, which knits together coverage via 17 satellites. Lepton will contlnue to operate as a wholly owned Kymeta subsidiary, with headquarters in Tysons Corner, Va., and a staff of fewer than 15 employees. The acquisition boosts Kymeta’s total workforce to nearly 200 people, said Bill Marks, Kymeta’s chief strategy officer. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
Lepton has already been hosting Kymeta’s satellite connectivity solutions, but bringing the two companies together meshes with Kymeta’s long-term plan to be much more than an antenna manufacturer.
“We’re moving away from just a hardware company to a solutions company,” Marks told GeekWire. “The solution means we need to bring best-of-breed hardware and we need to bring a connectivity solution, because customers want a one-stop shop.”
Kymeta is going in that direction with its next-generation flat-panel antenna and terminal system, known as u8. The hardware is bundled with hybrid satellite-cellular connectivity that’s priced like mobile phone service on a per-gigabyte basis.
Marks said the Kymeta Connect service is currently wrapping up alpha testing and getting ready to deploy beta-version hardware in several countries.
“It’s a really good product,” he said. “We’ve done a lot of innovation, and the performance is better. It works at higher temperatures. The tracking is better. It is really the kind of antenna that we had hoped for from the onset of the company.”
Kymeta was spun out from Bellevue, Wash.-based Intellectual Ventures in 2012, with support from Gates and other investors, to capitalize on technologies based on metamaterials. Such technologies use exotic electronics to steer radio signals dynamically, using compact flat-panel antennas that have no moving parts.
The approach is particularly attractive for mobile settings. Kymeta’s antennas have been tested on connected cars, buses, trains, aircraft and oceangoing yachts. One recent demonstration involved sending a connected car to California’s wildfires, to create a wireless mesh network for firefighters in the field.
“What they were most amazed by is, ‘Wow, my cellphone is working out in the middle of nowhere. How’s that happening?'” Marks said. “Well, it’s going through a satellite now, instead of a cell tower that doesn’t exist. So it’s a potential game-changer.”
Right now, Kymeta and Lepton work primarily with the operators of satellites in geosynchronous orbit, such as Intelsat (which took part in a $73.5 million funding round for Kymeta in 2017 but is now going through bankruptcy proceedings).
The market for connectivity is expected to get more complex in the years ahead due to the rise of satellite constellations in low Earth orbit, such as SpaceX’s Starlink, the reinvigorated OneWeb venture and Amazon’s future Project Kuiper network.
SpaceX is deep into the development of its own satellite antenna and terminal hardware, and the U.S. military is already trying out Starlink for defense applications. Marks said the military will have a need for networks that can handle multiple satellite and ground-based communications services, including Starlink, and Kymeta hopes to be in on that market.
Kymeta has already acknowledged working with Kepler Communications, one of the companies building a satellite constellation in low Earth orbit — and Marks hinted that Starlink is on his radar screen as well.
“We have successfully tracked Starlink’s constellation internally, so we already know that our antennas are capable of satisfying [the needs for] their constellation, the OneWeb constellation, the Kepler constellation,” Marks said. “We have a lot of customers that are asking us to look to Starlink, as an example, where a military customer would love to have a low-Earth-orbit constellation and our antenna. But there’s nothing formal between our companies at this point.”
