For decades, many businesses have only been able to track a fraction of their physical assets outside dense industrial environments like warehouses and fulfillment areas. We have entered a world where understanding the location and condition of all assets is crucial. Hubble Network is making that possible through a global network that can locate and report on the condition of virtually any asset. The bigger goal is solving location for everything. Lost packages. Untracked pallets. Containers crossing the ocean with no visibility.
Today, we’re announcing that Smith Point is leading Hubble Network’s $200 million Series C financing. This also marks the moment Hubble's satellite network moves from pilot access to general availability. Any Bluetooth® device can now connect directly to orbit.
Bluetooth device shipments are on track to approach eight billion by 2029 and are expected to grow 9% annually going forward. Their applications span logistics, healthcare, government, construction and several other mission-critical verticals – markets where Smith Point has crucial connectivity with key ecosystem partners.
Cellular networks cover roughly 15% of the Earth's landmass. The Hubble network covers the other 85% at a fraction of cost and orders of magnitude less deployment friction than legacy Internet of Things (IoT) technologies. More than 500,000 devices are now active on Hubble's network, a 10x jump from just a year ago.
Building a category-defining network, again
Solving a physics problem of this magnitude demands an exceptional founding team, and we have been particularly impressed by Hubble's founders, Alex Haro (CEO) and Ben Wild (CTO), who have each built category-defining networks before. Hubble founders Alex Haro (CEO) and Ben Wild Alex co-founded Life360, the consumer location-sharing app that’s now a $4+ billion public company. Ben founded Iotera, which Amazon acquired and built into Sidewalk, a shared network that keeps smart devices connected beyond the home.
They are now working in a much larger addressable market. We look forward to partnering with Alex and Ben, drawing on our significant experience with legacy technologies in the space, understanding of the pain points Hubble addresses, and deep bench of network contacts to accelerate the company’s growth.
Turning existing chips into satellite nodes
The RFID market alone exceeds $20 billion and has more than 50 billion deployed tags, yet it still relies on dedicated and expensive readers. That means wide-area, mobile, outdoor, or sparse assets get poor economics. Through a firmware upgrade or OEM relationships at the silicon level, Hubble delivers comparable visibility without any edge infrastructure, making it economically feasible to connect billions of previously unreachable devices for less than $1 per device, per month.
Hubble’s innovation spans both devices and satellites. In devices, a software-only firmware update extends any standard Bluetooth chip's range to orbit with no new hardware. And Hubble's satellites carry a massive phased-array antenna sensitive enough to detect a faint signal from space, including the entire addressable Bluetooth device market. From day one, the Hubble team set the bar of making the network disappear into an existing ecosystem.
Hubble operates six satellites in low Earth orbit today and integrates with its 100 million-node (and growing) Terrestrial Network. The team is building toward a 60-satellite constellation by 2030. The vertical use cases are virtually endless – limited only by the existing bluetooth device installed base, which covers every critical industry.
Similar to GPS, by pushing the marginal cost of location and data technology to zero, Hubble's network will be a key data unlock to a much wider universe of the physical world. It will do so without the months of friction and complexities that come with certifying devices, at a significantly lower cost, and with less power demand – enabling useful life of years.
Supply and demand compound
Hubble's Bluetooth to satellite network will become foundational infrastructure. The advantage compounds on both the supply and demand sides: chip-level exclusivity on the supply side, and a growing developer ecosystem on the demand side.
On the supply side, ecosystem lock-in is taking shape. Bluetooth is a dominant standard across industrial devices, with annual production of 5-7 billion units. The top three low-power semiconductor manufacturers — TI, Nordic, and Silicon Labs — are all integrating with Hubble and a similar pattern is happening across critical module and device makers. We see a world where every bluetooth chip manufactured comes off the line with the Hubble AI stack.
On the demand side, Samsara's recent launch of Asset Tags is an initial example where Hubble’s network will create a significant expansion in addressable assets — adding to Samsara’s data moat of 30 trillion data points, and powered by Hubble's network.
We saw this advantage first in the burgeoning smart label market, where the logistics universe all pointed to the same network unlock behind the Hubble Platform. New logistics players including Reelables and GenLogs are leveraging smart labels to provide global coverage to the largest logistics customers in the world – and all expect to use the Hubble network.
Samsara and several other mobile IoT players have already signed deals with Hubble, drawn by its ability to reach almost any BLE-enabled asset with a firmware upgrade. When one player becomes the platform for a category, the advantage is obvious and becomes table stakes to use cases involving new technologies like smart labels.
Both sides feed each other: the physical network, from chip to satellite, locks in supply, while the developer ecosystem secures demand.
Hubble is turning the physical world's blind spot into infrastructure. We look forward to leveraging our experience and network across critical verticals to help scale it into a multi-billion dollar company.
