This week, geospatial intelligence pioneer HawkEye 360 announced the successful close of a $145 million Series D venture capital round. The funding round was led by New York-based global private equity and venture capital firm Insight Partners and London-listed space tech fund Seraphim Space Investment Trust. Other participants included Strategic Development Fund (SDF), the investment arm of the United Arab Emirates’ Tawazun Holding, new investors Jacobs, Gula Tech Adventures, 116 Street Ventures, and New North Ventures, and returning investors Advance, Razor’s Edge, NightDragon, SVB Capital, Shield Capital, Adage Capital, and others.
The latest round brings HawkEye 360’s total capital raised to $302 million. The company says it plans to use the new capital to expand its proprietary satellite constellation and complementary infrastructure, keys to speeding the growth of its services to clients in the humanitarian, environmental, commercial and national security sectors.
HawkEye 360’s satellite constellation detects, characterizes and precisely geolocates radio frequency (RF) signals from a broad range of emitters, including VHF marine radios, UHF push-to-talk radios, maritime and land-based radar systems, L-band satellite devices and emergency beacons. The company then processes and analyzes this RF-generated data for use in a broad range of sectors. In September of this year, the company announced that it had secured new contracts worth more than $50 million for the year-to-date, having launched a trio of satellites (Cluster 3) aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket over the summer.
HawkEye 360 is pleased to be welcoming phenomenal new partners to our world class investment family, all of whom share our vision of using revolutionary commercial RF-monitoring capabilities to produce positive impacts for humanity and the environment,” said HawkEye 360 CEO John Serafini. “As a new, well-backed space data and analytics company with a unique dual-use technology, we are ideally situated not only to create great value for the defense, intelligence and national security communities, but also to change the paradigm for organizations confronting complex challenges like illegal fishing, poaching, maritime smuggling and environmental degradation.”
“HawkEye 360 stands out as the clear leader in commercial RF data and analytics,” said Nick Sinai, Managing Director at Insight Partners, who will join HawkEye 360’s board. “We are excited to partner with HawkEye 360 as the company continues to scale up and to expand its geospatial intelligence technology capabilities for both government and commercial markets.”
“We seek to invest into the emerging category leaders building a digital platform in the sky,” said Mark Boggett, CEO of Seraphim Space (Manager) LLP, Seraphim Investment Trust’s investment manager. “We can say with conviction that HawkEye 360 is the undisputed global champion in radio frequency analysis, a market we believe will grow to billions of dollars over the next few years. We’ve carefully built our relationship with HawkEye 360 since 2017, culminating with them participating in the AWS Space Accelerator managed by Seraphim. Our subsequent $25 million investment, as co-lead alongside Insight Ventures, in the D Series reflects the potential we believe this breakthrough technology will have across the environmental and security sectors. We are convinced that HawkEye 360 has both the technology advantage together with the commercial and governmental relationships to transform, reshape and develop the industry on a global scale at speed.”
