Intel Capital funds direct-to-device satellite connectivity Skylo

Other investors included BMW i Ventures, Next47, Samsung Catalyst Fund, and the UK’s Seraphim Space. As part of the investment, the Intel Capital Managing Director, David Johnson, joins the Skylo board.

“As lead investors, we recognise the transformative potential of Skylo’s scalable approach for 5G satellite-to-device communications,” said Johnson.

“Since our first meeting with Parth [Parthsarathi “Parth” Trivedi, CEO and co-founder of Skylo] and the team, we’ve been impressed with the extensive industry ecosystem support they’ve received in delivering a complete end-to-end connectivity service for high volume device categories at low cost.”

The company says the new investment will be used to better support smartphones, wearables, IoT devices, and mobile network operator customers. It says the funding represents “a major step in Skylo’s commitment to making standards based non-terrestrial networks (NTN) more accessible and efficient for numerous sectors, including consumer, automotive, agriculture, energy, transportation, and beyond”. It will also increase its head-count and marketing efforts.

Skylo

Skylo, which is based in Mountain View, California, was founded in 2017 by a group of engineers and scientists (pictured right) from MIT and Stanford.

In November last year, Viasat and Skylo Technologies announced the launch of a global direct-to-device network. Their infrastructure agreement will, they said, allow Mobile Network Operators (MNOs), device makers and chipset manufacturers to take 3GPP Release 17 compliant products to market using Viasat’s network coverage (and that of future partners). They described it as the “world’s first global D2D network”.

Inmarsat provides the capacity backbone to deliver the IoT systems of Skylo.

Image: Skylo Hub

See also: UNIO raises €2.5m to speed auto 5G-satellite connectivity