Muon Space closes $140M Series B and signs SpaceX Starlink partnership for satellite broadband backhaul

second time on the show. Um, and we had a great we actually played a clip from our previous interview yesterday. Uh, and we're very excited to talk to him both about what's going on in his world, but uh I'll welcome him to the show now. How are you doing, Johnny? Good to see you. Hey, guys. Good to see you guys again.

Welcome back. Thanks so much. We enjoyed the we we we enjoyed the previous uh guest segment immensely. We played a clip from that segment yesterday and we were trying to yeah we were trying to contextualize space data centers.

Um we're actually having the founder of the space data center company come back on the show uh to defend what's going on since a lot of people are skeptical. Where do you sit on it now? This all feels like I'm not ready to call it even a binary. I I think we should be discussing timelines more than will it ever happen.

But how are you thinking about space data center? Yeah, I mean I think it's it's it's a like many things it's a when not if. Um you know is it a year from now? Is it 10 years from now? Is it 20 years from now? I don't know.

But I think if you think about generally the future of the planet and where we're going on it, more and more stuff is going to move to space and um so I think it's inevitable at some level that we will have large scale, you know, IT infrastructure in space.

I mean, you know, we're probably going to talk about our deal with Starlink in a minute, and that's an example of a place where I think we're starting to really see what I would call truly modern IT infrastructure starting to show up in space. And and I think it's inevitable that data centers will go there as well.

A lot depends, I think, obviously, on the fundamentals of what is going to drive the need for future data center capacity, right? And how some of those needs are met, uh, you know, on on on Earth and and then and how that would compare to deploying things in space.

I think if you ask anybody even, you know, what a terrestrial data center will look like in 5 years, they're probably not going to give you a real confident answer. So, I think, you know, trying to predict exactly what that's going to look like in space is hard to do right now. Absolutely.

What uh yeah, what what more can you say about the this new partnership? Well, yeah. I mean, I think, you know, one of the things we like to think we're uh we're doing at Yuon is really uh pulling a lot of the aerospace industry uh kicking and screaming out of the stone age.

Um, and you know, you think about a lot of the stuff that's circling the earth right now and and uh it's still connected with things that look like dialup modems, frankly. I mean, I think we're we're kind of in an era where a lot of the space technologies a few generations behind what we take for granted on Earth.

Um, and this partnership with SpaceX is now going to give our satellites things that look a lot more like a a an always on fiber or broadband connection uh rather than a dial-up connection.

And so that's going to completely unlock you know a tremendous set of things that have been very difficult or impossible to do um in space historically much as you know Starlink has demonstrated with terrestrial use cases.

Um you know an example that I'm you know we're all very excited about at Nuon is uh we've been working on this global wildfire constellation for the last several years.

This will eventually be a 50 plus satellite constellation that will get 20-minute global uh revisit latency to detect and and track wildfires at the from the earliest stages of their life cycle all the way through uh to help you know decision makers on the ground make better decisions.

And a really critical piece of making that system work well is getting that data back to people that are making decisions at very low latency. These satellites produce enormous amounts of data. There's going to be 50 of them.

So having this kind of fiber connection in the sky is absolutely transformative in terms of being able to deliver um a capability that's crucially needed around the world and it has not been possible to date. So I think it's a really good example of uh what this technology can unlock.

Is fiber a metaphor or are you physically putting fiber in the sky somehow? I mean, people are putting data. We have big glass spools and we're kind of unwinding them behind. I mean, we're going to put data massive 1 gig data centers in space. Like, I wouldn't be that doesn't sound that crazy.

Put a humanoid up there with a spool. Exactly. So, so, so, so you're not you're not literally putting fiber in the sky. Uh, it's more about connectivity between Starlink satellites or are you putting up your own satellites that are acting as kind of backall between the Starling satellites?

We're basically using Starlink as our back haul. So you can think about them as sort of our network in the sky and then we'll be connecting with SpaceX lasers or laser terminals they call mini lasers into their network and using that network as kind of the back hall system.

So it's not literally unwinding glass fire this guy but actually the technology is very similar to fiber optic you know technology on on Earth and a lot of the same componentry is used. We're just thinning the light over these kind of free space optical beams not over glass fibers. And then and then who's your customer?

Is it someone who's who has a satellite or a constellation in space that needs to move internet data around while in space or is it more for speed up terrestrial uses in some way or or just include the Starlink network? So, we're building satellites for customers.

So, our satellites, you know, sort of broad range of customers. One, you know, one of the customers I I mentioned is this there's a global nonprofit that's funding the work on the fire mission. So, ultimately we're we're building satellites for them. their muon satellites that we deploy and operate.

Um, and this will now provide sort of a much faster, lower latency network layer for us to operate those satellites on. Um, other examples of of customers we're working with, you know, we have a a customer called Hubble that's doing Bluetooth low energy tracking from space.

So, you can kind of think about like IoT uh device tracking from space. Um, we have the company is called Hubble. Yeah, it's called Hubble. What a confusing name.

I I know that there was a contact lens company named Hubble and that kind of made sense because it's like a wildly different market, but if you're out there in space, so so I I can imagine the commercial use cases for that, right?

Uh if you if you have a lot of hardware out around the world and you want to track it in real time, uh is that uh does that have like defense applications as well? Like what what are what are kind of like what's it what's the actual focus there? Yeah.

So I I don't want to speak for Hubble, you know, they would better for themselves than I will to our customer, but I I mean I think their primary focus is on sort of enterprise and commercial use cases.

So, you know, there's millions of asset tracking devices in the world today that are out tracking, you know, shipping containers and remote uh facility uh equipment, things like that. And a lot of those are running on kind of these bespoke and frankly very old school satellite networks.

That's how they get the data back. And I think Hubble's vision is that, you know, it it we should be doing the same thing we're doing with consumer devices, which is strapping a a 9- cent Bluetooth transponder on anything that's out in the world and then being able to track that thing from space.

And so, um, we think there's a lot, you know, I I think they believe there are many many commercial and enterprise applications of that. There probably are also, you know, government applications of that.

I don't want to speak specifically to them, but um I think that's you know it's it's a it's a type all of these types of technologies especially with spacecraft in some way inherently dual use. So there's always going to be use cases in both the commercial and the government sector. Give us the fundraising update.

I feel like we missed you around series B potentially. Do you have news? What's up? Uh we don't have news. I mean we we we raised kind of a two-part series B last year and this year. Uh it's a big round for us. I think it totaled about $140 million. Um, oh, we got the gone coming.

Uh, so yeah, we're doing we're doing well on the fundraising size. We're we're well funded. We've got a lot of business coming in. It's been very exciting days around the company. So, uh, it's a pretty pretty uh, exciting um, path forward right now. We're really just trying to scale the company up a lot.

We have a big facility. Uh, we're in we're in the Bay Area. We signed a large facility earlier this year.

So, we'll be kind of 10xing our production capability, our hardware production capability in the South Bay uh before the end of the year and um and then building out a lot of uh other new technology pieces that we're really excited to talk about as uh as as we start to hit space with them. Fantastic.

Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Congratulations on the progress and uh yeah, thanks for breaking all that down for us. Now, we know there's not literally fiber cables up in the sky. That's why we asked the dumb question.