Infostellar, a highly innovative ground-segment-as-a-service (GSaaS) provider, has raised a total of USD 3.5 million in convertible bonds with existing investors Airbus Ventures and Sony Innovation Fund, while welcoming new investors Daiwa Energy Infrastructure, Mitsubishi UFJ Capital, and Mitsubishi UFJ Lease and Finance. As a result, the cumulative amount of funds raised now reaches USD 11.5 million.
Infostellar is continuing to raise additional funds, and this round is scheduled to be closed by June 2020.
Since the last funding round in July 2017, Infostellar has developed StellarStation, a ground station platform for flexible and scalable satellite operations, and has verified the feasibility of satellite communication through sharing ground stations. We provide several satellite operators with an average of 500 passes per month through StellarStation.
In addition, we have contracts with ground station owners in several countries around the world, including government owned ground stations. The total number of ground stations on the growing StellarStation network is 13.
The purpose of this finance round is to accelerate Infostellar's business activities, specifically to hire business development and sales personnel and to strengthen Infostellar management. We will continue to develop our business activities throughout Europe and Asia, and provide satellite operators with a more flexible and expandable ground station network for full global deployment.
With this finance round, we received new investment from operating companies including Daiwa Energy Infrastructure and Mitsubishi UFJ Lease and Finance, who can also provide customers key financial solutions.
The sharing of the non-operating or 'idle' time of existing ground stations, which Infostellar has pioneered as part of the StellarStation network, is recognised by many satellite operators as an important and flexible asset for initial operations, backup, demonstrations of technology and business models, and added responsiveness for sudden demand. We have also seen that there is an increasing demand from some satellite operators to reserve more passes, or satellite <> ground communication opportunities, in bulk.
In order to continuously meet such demand, we are exploring initiatives to flexibly expand the ground station network through cooperation with Daiwa Energy Infrastructure, Mitsubishi UFJ Lease and Finance, and existing ground station partners.
