Herndon data analytics company HawkEye 360 Inc. is looking to the future — including building more satellites and expanding its real estate — after recently closing a massive $145 million in funding that's on track to be one of the largest venture capital deals of the year in Greater Washington.
With the Series D funding, CEO John Serafini said the company will more than double the number of satellite “clusters” it currently plans to build. As part of its business model, HawkEye 360 flies clusters or groups of three satellites and collects radio and frequency data for customers, which span commercial, environmental and national security sectors, as well as other industries.
Currently, the company operates three satellite clusters, and it's already underway on adding seven more that were fully funded by its series B and C funding rounds. With the latest investment, Hawkeye 360 plans to build an additional 10 clusters on top of what was already in the works, eventually bringing its total clusters to 20, or 60 individual satellites and boosting the amount of data it can gather to sell to clients.
“Sixty satellites is an enormous amount of collection capacity,” Serafini said in an interview. “It will generate a lot of data that will allow us to meet the requirements of more customers to be able to develop new applications that customers require.”
The money will also fund the company's development of a new “orchestration platform” that will make it easier to coordinate between different satellites and zero in on certain areas to analyze them more deeply.
As part of the company's growth, Serafini said it aims to open a new office location near its current Herndon headquarters, which sits at 196 Van Buren St., to house some engineering employees and include a manufacturing facility. That will open in the next three to four months — and will double or triple the company's real estate footprint in the next quarter, Serafini said.
Hiring, however, will continue at a steady clip, he said. The staff now stands at 125 strong, a number Serafini said he’s happy with — it's up significantly from about 40 employees in mid-2019.
“It's a close, highly efficient, highly productive, thoughtful group of employees,” he said. “So we’ll continue to grow, you know, 15%, 20%, maybe 25% year over year in terms of our headcount. We don't need to double in size next year in order to be able to perform our mission.”
PitchBook, a venture data firm, estimates HawkEye 360’s valuation has risen to $455 million, a number Serafini declined to confirm. It joins what's become a veritable hub for satellite and space communications companies based in Northern Virginia, and Herndon in particular.
For HawkEye, Serafini said mergers and acquisitions weren't part of its core growth strategy, but they're not out of the realm of possibility. “If an interesting acquisition opportunity comes along, we're now uniquely equipped to be able to potentially acquire those companies,” he said.
Company leaders “are not really considering the possibility of a sale” at the moment — often a potential option for a company that's raised funding of this magnitude — but they are potentially “contemplating” the idea of going public, Serafini said. He declined to comment further, describing a public markets debut as “a strategic discussion that we think about.”
He said the company is more focused for now on scaling up and increasing its customer and revenue base, moves he said “will unlock additional doors down the road.”
HawkEye was founded in 2015 by Chris DeMay as a spinoff from Boston venture creation firm Allied Minds, which licenses and sells technology from government and academic labs. The company launched its first satellite cluster in December 2018 and brought its first product, RFGeo, to market in April of this year. Serafini, a senior executive at Allied Minds, took over as HawkEye's CEO in 2016.
The latest Series D round, led by New York’s Insight Partners and British tech fund Seraphim Space Investment Trust, brings the company's total funding to date to $302 million.
