McLean’s Iridium to purchase Satelles

McLean-based Iridium Communications, a global satellite communications company, has entered into an agreement to acquire Satelles, a Reston-based provider of satellite-based time and location services that serve as a backup for GPS and other global navigation satellite systems (GNSS), Iridium announced Monday.

Satelles’ positioning, navigation and timing (PNT) service is known as Satellite Time and Location (STL), and it’s an alternative to GPS-reliant systems. According to Monday’s news release, Iridium has an ownership stake of 20% in Satelles through three earlier investments, and it will pay about $115 million for the other 80%, with the purchase closing within a few weeks. This is Iridium’s first acquisition. 

“This market is growing; it’s a perfect application of our network, and this solution solves a problem for critical industries better than anything else,” Matt Desch, Iridium’s CEO, said in a statement Monday. Satelles CEO Michael O’Connor will lead STL at Iridium and will report to Desch. 

“Bringing STL into the Iridium family is going to be a supercharger for this capability that will benefit our customers and our society,” O’Connor said.

STL increases the efficiency and reliability of timing systems for digital infrastructure like data centers, according to the news release, and STL is resilient to regional GNSS outages, uses low-cost hardware and works inside buildings. 

Spherical Insights, an Ohio-based market research firm, estimates the market for assured PNT services will reach $3.5 billion by 2032. Industries including financial services, telecommunications and cybersecurity rely on an estimated 10,000 data centers globally that have hundreds of millions of data processing and storage servers, according to Iridium. 

Iridium, which assumed all rights to the Satelles patent portfolio, expects STL to generate over $100 million in service revenue annually by 2030 and additional revenue from equipment and engineering, according to the release.

In 2023, Iridium reported total revenue of $790.7 million, up 10% from 2022, and net income of $15.4 million, an improvement from $8.7 million in 2022.

The company has 66 operational cross-linked satellites and 14 spares, and Iridium’s mobile voice and data satellite communications network is used in ships, planes and land vehicles and for Internet of Things systems.