PARIS — With a recent funding round and growing demand for its radio-frequency geolocation capabilities, HawkEye 360’s chief executive says the corporate has reached an “inflection point” on the trail towards profitability and potentially going public.
HawkEye 360 announced July 13 it raised $58 million in a Series D-1 round led by BlackRock. The corporate said then that the funding would support development of latest satellites and analytics products.
The corporate has raised $368 million so far, said John Serafini, chief executive of HawkEye 360, in an interview during World Satellite Business Week here Sept. 13. That round may additionally be the last private funding the corporate needs to boost.
“Provided that we execute against our revenue forecasts, that are conservative and we expect we will do, we won’t need to boost additional private capital,” he said. Profitability, he added, “is on the horizon for us,” but didn’t offer a selected timeline for achieving it.
In a presentation at an investor conference a 12 months ago, Serafini said the corporate was considering going public though an initial public offering (IPO) of stock in two to a few years. That remains to be the plan now, he said, although the timing will depend as much on market conditions as it should the state of the corporate.
“The market being open or closed has rather a lot to do with it,” he said of the timing of an IPO, which he said stays likely two to a few years out. “Whether we will achieve the requisite milestones is the most important issue,” corresponding to achieving profitability and the suitable unit economics. “That’s what we will control and we’re rushing like heck to get to that spot.”
The brand new funding and the expansion of the business have put HawkEye 360 into position, he argued. “I might say we’re at an inflection point,” he said, from the funding to plans to launch additional satellites and development of analytics tools that leverage machine learning and artificial intelligence. “All of that in the subsequent 12 to 18 months has got us in an ideal position.”
Governments remain the biggest customers for HawkEye 360, which Serafini said will likely be the case for the foreseeable future. That has included defense and intelligence applications in addition to some civil and broader security applications, like tracking illegal fishing or deforestation.
“Considered one of the tenets we set the corporate up with was to give attention to where the cash is. The cash in distant sensing is, ultimately, in defense and intelligence,” he said. “When you can’t service those customers, you’re not going to exist as an organization.”
That work has included work in Ukraine since Russia’s invasion greater than a 12 months and a half ago, tracking sources of GPS and other radio-frequency interference. Serafini declined to enter details in regards to the company’s work there, but he said the conflict has highlighted the importance of each business distant sensing capabilities typically in addition to the necessity to work closely with the users of those capabilities.
“Throwing distant sensing data over a fence probably doesn’t result in success,” he said. “Considered one of the areas of growth for HawkEye is knowing the tactical intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance requirements of our customers, and the networks and systems that they operate in, such that our data can flow into their existing systems as seamlessly as possible and produce one other layer of helpful intelligence, not only drowning them in additional data.”
That data comes from 21 satellites currently in orbit. Six more are scheduled to launch later this 12 months on a Rocket Lab Electron from Latest Zealand. The corporate’s long-term goal is to have 60 satellites, in 20 three-satellite clusters, which Serafini said the corporate expects to attain by 2025 or 2026.
Those satellites, built each by the Space Flight Laboratory on the University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies in addition to HawkEye 360’s own facility in Northern Virginia, shall be a combination of each its existing Block 2 design and recent Block 3 design. The plans for Block 3 are “very fluid,” he said, and will feature two different designs, a smaller one to give attention to specific signals and a bigger one to do “very advanced” work.
HawkEye 360 also announced Sept. 12 it promoted Rob Rainhart, the corporate’s chief operating officer since 2019, to president.
“Rob and I even have been partners together for eight years,” Serafini said. Rainhart handles internal company operations, responsibilities he’ll proceed as president. “He keeps the corporate running on time, and so it felt like the suitable time to make the move to advertise him to president.”