Hubble Opens Its Satellite Network to Every Bluetooth Device: $200M Series C Puts IoT Tracking on a $1.6B Map

Introduction

For most of the history of the Internet of Things, "connectivity" has quietly meant "cellular connectivity." That assumption has governed hardware design decisions, carrier contracts and unit-cost targets for the better part of a decade. It is a bad assumption, because cellular coverage reaches roughly 15 percent of the Earth's landmass. The other 85 percent has effectively been dark to any device that wanted to report its location or its sensor readings.

On September 23, 2026, Hubble Network of Seattle announced that it is throwing its satellite service open to the public and raising a $200 million Series C at a $1.6 billion valuation. The mechanism is genuinely unusual: a Bluetooth Low Energy radio — the same short-range chip already sitting inside billions of earbuds, fitness bands, smart bulbs and asset tags — is repurposed as a beacon that orbiting satellites can hear directly. No dedicated satellite modem. No new antenna. A firmware update and the device is on the network.

The detail that matters more than the funding headline is the price. Hubble says that for a new design, adding this connectivity costs under 50 cents in bill-of-materials terms, roughly one-tenth the cost of a cellular modem and one-fiftieth the cost of a satellite transceiver. That is the kind of number that changes what gets built, and this category has been waiting for it.

General Availability After a Year of Pilots

Hubble's company announcement describes a deliberate progression rather than a launch splash. Early satellite access was limited to a small set of pilot customers. The network is now generally available: any company already on Hubble's Terrestrial Network can extend existing hardware to satellite coverage with a firmware change, and new customers can register an off-the-shelf development kit in the Hubble dashboard and see data flowing within minutes.

The financing is the second half of the announcement. The $200 million Series C is led by Smith Point Capital, with Seraphim, Carthona Capital, Earthshot Ventures, Y Combinator and RPM Ventures participating. It brings total funding to $300 million and sets the valuation at $1.6 billion — roughly one year after a $70 million Series B at a materially lower number. Keith Block, founder and CEO of Smith Point Capital, framed the bet as infrastructure: Hubble has "built the foundational infrastructure that the physical world is missing."

The Network as It Stands Today

The operating numbers suggest the pilots produced more than slideware:

6 satellites in low Earth orbit today, on track for 60 by 2030.
100 million+ gateways on the Terrestrial Network, across 170 countries and 3 million+ square miles.
500,000+ devices active, more than a 10x increase year over year.

The two-tier architecture is the interesting engineering decision. Hubble does not attempt to hear every Bluetooth transmission from orbit directly — that is a physics and power problem that CEO and co-founder Alex Haro said most of the industry believed was unsolvable. Instead, the dense terrestrial gateway layer does most of the receiving in populated areas, and satellites cover the gaps. The company partnered with Texas Instruments over the past year to send location and sensor data without gateways, GPS or cellular; with InPlay to pair a sub-$1 chip with its gateways for item-level tracking at RFID economics; and with Reelables to put printable smart labels on cargo. Muon Space is building the next-generation satellites on its MuSat XL platform.

That division of labor also frames the honest limits. Six satellites is a demonstration constellation, not a global one. The 2030 target of 60 is what actually delivers the coverage claim.

The Cost Argument

Hubble's framing of the opportunity is blunt. Cellular reaches about 15 percent of landmass, and tracking anything beyond it has required dedicated satellite hardware at $25 or more per unit. At that price, only the highest-value assets get tracked. Hubble cites asset theft and loss costing the average mid-sized business $13 million per year, and its pitch is that a sub-50-cent radio moves tracking from the "pallet and above" tier down to the individual item tier.

The named enterprise customer is Samsara (NYSE: IOT), one of the pilot participants, and its connected-equipment business is extending visibility to crews working past the edge of reliable coverage. David Gal, VP of Product and Engineering, Connected Equipment at Samsara, said the company serves customers "on the frontlines in some of the most remote parts of the world, where reliable connectivity can be hard to come by," and added that Hubble "gives us a way to extend visibility beyond the reach of traditional networks without adding new hardware."

That combination — an operator with millions of devices already deployed, and a satellite backstop that requires no hardware swap — is the pattern most likely to produce volume. Samsara's installed base is precisely the kind of fleet that stops at the edge of coverage today.

The gap Hubble is attacking is not theoretical. The most valuable, most demanding tracking use cases — construction sites, offshore energy, agriculture, mining, remote utilities, long-haul logistics — are almost all in the 85 percent of landmass cellular does not serve. A fleet-management platform whose telemetry fails exactly where the work is hardest is a real operational limit, and it is one that has been remarkably well tolerated for years because the alternative cost a quarter of a dollar per unit.

The Longer Convergence

Hubble is not the only actor trying to close the coverage gap, and the September news cycle shows the pressure arriving from several directions at once. Separately, Thread Group has approved development of a Sub-GHz physical layer for Thread, extending the mesh standard below the 2.4 GHz band toward building automation, healthcare lighting retrofits and property-wide industrial sensor networks — the same long-range, IP-based problem, approached from the terrestrial side. Zigbee has opened certification for its own Sub-GHz stack. And the eSIM supply chain is industrializing around SGP.32, with Kigen bringing SGP.32 v1.3 to eSA-certified automotive eSIMs and NTT DOCOMO BUSINESS adding SGP.32 support to its global IoT connectivity platform.

The pattern across all of these: the hard part of IoT is no longer silicon. Radio design, low-power compute and standard protocols are all substantially solved. What remains unsolved is coverage economics, provisioning and identity, and the unglamorous logistics of keeping millions of devices addressable for a decade. Work in this category increasingly resembles network engineering rather than hardware engineering.

As with previous waves, the underlying compute story is being written in parallel — the edge-AI and cloud infrastructure layers that consume all of this telemetry are scaling on their own schedule, covered here in Cloud & Edge and Semiconductors coverage.

Conclusion

Hubble's Series C is best read as a bet on unit economics rather than on a technical novelty. The claim that a satellite can hear a Bluetooth LE transmission from hundreds of kilometers up has been made before; the claim that it can be done for under 50 cents of bill-of-materials, at volumes that make item-level tracking rational, is what is new — and what the $1.6 billion valuation is pricing.

Three things will settle whether the thesis holds. Whether six satellites become sixty on schedule. Whether Samsara and the other pilot customers convert satellite coverage from a demonstration into a shipped default. And whether the sub-50-cent figure holds at manufacturing scale, since component costs at volume rarely behave as modeled.

If all three land, the practical consequence is mundane and significant: the majority of the planet stops being a place where connected devices have to stay silent.

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References

Hubble Network — "Hubble Network Opens Satellite Coverage to All Bluetooth Devices, Raises $200 Million Series C at $1.6 Billion Valuation" (September 23, 2026)
Business Wire — Hubble Network Series C and general availability announcement (September 23, 2026)
Matter Alpha — "Thread Group officially moves toward Sub-G for long-range networking" (September 21, 2026)
IoT Business News — Kigen SGP.32 v1.3 automotive eSIM announcement (September 24, 2026)
Samsara Inc. — connected equipment platform