HawkEye 360 Inc. has raised a gargantuan $145 million in new funding — just seven months after raking in a previous $55 million — as it penetrates a market poised for exponential growth.
The Herndon data analytics company, which provides radio frequency data to commercial customers and others, said Monday it has closed the Series D round led by New York’s Insight Partners and British tech fund Seraphim Space Investment Trust. The capital also came from new investors Jacobs, Gula Tech Adventures, 116 Street Ventures, New North Ventures and Strategic Development Fund, the investment arm of UAE's Tawazun Holding. Existing investors that also participated in the round include Advance, Razor's Edge, NightDragon, SVB Capital, Shield Capital and Adage Capital.
HawkEye said it plans to use the financing to expand its satellite network and develop the infrastructure and capacity around it. That, it said, will help speed up growth of its software and other services for customers in the commercial, environmental, humanitarian and national security sectors.
The raise brings its total funding since its 2015 founding to $302 million, including a $55 million Series C round in April, a $70 million Series B funding in August 2019 and a $11 million Series A round in November 2016. By spring 2021, PitchBook pegged the company’s valuation at $455 million. The company declined through a spokeswoman to share its latest valuation.
The company, led by CEO John Serafini, tracks radio frequency data from satellites in space. It's a market that could grow by billions of dollars in the next few years, according to Mark Boggett, CEO of Seraphim Space (Manager) LLP, the investment manager for Seraphim Space Investment Trust, a fund focused on space technology with offices in Los Angeles and the U.K. that's been a longtime backer of HawkEye.
Seraphim, which managed the Amazon Web Services Space Accelerator where the local company had participated in a cohort, invested $25 million of the $145 million, Boggett said in a statement. That backing “reflects the potential we believe this breakthrough technology will have across the environmental and security sectors,” he said.
Jacobs, another new investor in this round, also plans to integrate HawkEye's technology with its own as part of a distribution agreement "that will enable them to bring our analytics into accounts they are well-positioned to serve," Serafini said in a Q&A the company shared with the Washington Business Journal.
HawkEye has doubled its annual revenue and signed new contracts totaling $50 million since the start of 2020, Serafini said in the Q&A. “We are seeing more demand than we can currently serve, but this investment will be instrumental for us to meet this spiraling demand,” he said.
One of those contracts was a $10 million, one-year deal with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency to help map activities that fuel radio frequencies, with the option for an additional four years. The company now counts nine satellites that monitor radio frequency and another 21 slated to go live within the next year, GPS World reported in October.
The company was a 2017 Washington Business Journal Innovation Awards honoree, recognized for the creation of radio-frequency mapping from space.
