Hubble network became the first company in history to establish a Bluetooth connection directly to a satellite. This is a key technology validation for the company, potentially opening the door to connecting hundreds of thousands more devices anywhere in the world.
The Seattle-based startup launched its first two satellites into orbit in March as a part of the joint SpaceX Transporter-10 mission; the company has since confirmed that it receives signals from its onboard 3.5mm Bluetooth chips from over 600 kilometers away.
The sky’s truly the limit for space-enabled Bluetooth devices: The startup claims its technology could possibly be used in markets including logistics, cattle tracking, smart pet collars, GPS watches for children, automobile inventory, construction sites and temperature monitoring soil. Haro said low-hanging fruit are those industries that desperately need network coverage even once a day, equivalent to distant asset monitoring in the oil and gas industry. As the constellation scales, Hubble will focus its attention on sectors which will require more frequent updates, equivalent to soil monitoring, to long-range use cases, equivalent to monitoring falls for the elderly.
Once launched, the customer will simply need to integrate their devices’ chipsets into the 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 pitched the idea of connecting a Bluetooth chip to a satellite, his first response was, “No way.” And it does sound crazy, especially since consumer electronics can have difficulty connecting to other Bluetooth-enabled devices that are just a few meters away.
But the demand is there: existing IoT devices are power-hungry, expensive to operate and lack global connectivity, the company says. These are the fundamental limitations currently associated with Bluetooth-enabled devices and prevent many industries from leveraging IoT in their businesses.
The company joined Y Combinator’s Winter 2022 cohort and closed a $20 million Series A in March last 12 months. Hubble’s first innovation was the development of software that enabled off-the-shelf Bluetooth chips to communicate over very long distances with low power consumption.
On the space front, the company has also patented a phased array antenna that might be launched at a small satellite. The antennas work almost like a magnifying glass, and it is thanks to them that a commercially available Bluetooth chip can communicate with the Hubble satellite. The team also had to solve Doppler problems, which are frequency mismatches between fast-moving objects exchanging data using radio waves.
One of Hubble’s satellites in a ground-based test chamber.
Hubble intends to launch a third satellite on the SpaceX Transporter-11 mission this summer and a fourth on Transporter-13. These 4 satellites will form what Haro called a “beta constellation,” and pilot customers are starting to enable their integrations today, he said. The startup plans to launch one other 32 satellites concurrently in the fourth quarter of 2025 or early 2026, although a launch provider has not yet been chosen.
These 36 satellites will form Hubble’s first “production constellation” and will enable connection to the Hubble satellite for roughly 2-3 hours a day from anywhere in the world.