Virginia-based Spire Global is to build and launch satellites for IoT connectivity provider Lacuna Space.

Spire Global is a provider of space-based data, analytics and space services. Under the agreement, Spire will initially build and launch six satellites carrying Lacuna Space’s payload and antenna, with the opportunity to scale the constellation to dozens of satellites.

Lacuna Space will operate its payloads and receive encrypted data at its UK headquarters.

With six satellites manufactured by Spire at its facility in Glasgow, UK, in addition to Lacuna Space’s ten earlier satellites, Lacuna Space will be able to scale its IoT network for low-cost, reliable global connections to sensors and mobile equipment.

Lacuna focuses on IoT services for agriculture, maritime, logistics, remote infrastructure and environmental monitoring, with applications such as measuring soil moisture for farmers in remote regions to improve crop yield or tracking the movement of assets.

These satellites feature Lacuna’s latest proprietary, high-density Gentoo satellite gateway. The gateways work with Lacuna’s ground scheduling network, which enables adaptive, regional, fine-frequency algorithms developed using AI from years of satellite-based spectrum scans.

“Satellites play a critical role in providing IoT connectivity across the globe, particularly to remote, underserved and developing areas of the world,” said Frank Frulio, general manager of space services at Spire. “These services are transformational in enabling new applications across a wide variety of industries and solving some of the biggest challenges facing humanity today. With Spire space services, we have streamlined the process to architect, build, launch and operate satellites reliably, and at a much lower cost than it would typically require new space companies to build infrastructure in space, allowing revolutionary technologies, like Lacuna’s IoT network, to reach the market faster.”

Rob Spurrett, CEO of Lacuna Space, added: “This contract is a very important step in Lacuna’s progression into commercial operations, and represents over five years of intensive development work to refine the concept and achieve the scalability and reliability required to provide a global commercial service.”

And Craig Brown, investment director at the UK Space Agency, said: “Glasgow produces more satellites than anywhere else in Europe, and this contract between Spire Global and Lacuna Space is a fantastic example of how the UK’s strong heritage in space manufacturing is accelerating our progress towards global connectivity and new commercial applications for telecommunication. This collaboration will unlock opportunities for businesses, using satellites to transfer data and information between millions of sensors on the ground that make up IoT, with the potential to scale up further. I’m looking forward to watching the constellation come to life.”

Spire offers fast and scalable access to space through a subscription model that eliminates the high upfront cost of building and maintaining infrastructure in space. The company has designed, built and launched more than 170 satellites, enabling commercial and government organisations to deploy and operate a constellation, hosted payload or a software application in space leveraging Spire’s established space, ground and web infrastructure. Spire handles the end-to-end management, from manufacturing to launch to satellite operations, and the user operates the system through a web API.

Spire (spire.com) is a provider of space-based data, analytics and space services, offering datasets and insights about Earth so organisations can make decisions. Spire builds, owns and operates a fully deployed satellite constellation that observes the Earth in real time using radio frequency technology. The data acquired by Spire’s satellites provide global weather intelligence, ship and plane movements, and spoofing and jamming detection to predict how their patterns impact economies, global security, business operations and the environment. Spire has nine offices across the USA, Canada, UK, Luxembourg, Germany and Singapore.

Lacuna Space (lacuna.space), a UK and Dutch entity, headquartered in Oxford, UK, provides scalable direct-to-satellite IoT based on LoRaWan. The Lacuna Network enables multiple constellations of Lacuna and third-party satellites to meld together, forming a robust and field-proven IoT service.