Global satellite broadband venture OneWeb has announced that it has secured US$500m in series A funding from a group of international companies comprising Airbus Group, Bharti Enterprises, Hughes Network Systems, Intelsat, Qualcomm, Coca-Cola, Virgin…
Global satellite broadband venture OneWeb has announced that it has secured US$500m in series A funding from a group of international companies comprising Airbus Group, Bharti Enterprises, Hughes Network Systems, Intelsat, Qualcomm, Coca-Cola, Virgin Group and Totalplay, a media and telecoms group owned by Mexican billionaire Ricardo Salinas.
Speaking at a press conference in London, OneWeb’s CEO and founder, Greg Wyler, said the investment would last several years and that the company would seek one more funding round as part of its business plan.
Wyler said: “It turns out that there are a lot of people who are interested in funding who could not participate in this round. We set the limit at US$500m this time. We have a debt equity structure like most normal companies so we will also be raising debt.”
Wyker added that the company is in talks with export credit agencies, both Coface of France and the US Export-Import Bank. He said: “It is obviously an important part of all large-scale satellite construction projects. We have had discussions with a number of export credit agencies and we have had very positives reports on the project.
“One thing that they look at and one thing that we have had to do is that we couldn’t imagine the sort of technology we were going use for this system, we had to have all the pieces in place. You have to be able to demonstrate that everything can be built and the technology to do this is here and ready. And you need to do that for financing, certainly for debt financing. The ECAs have a conservative route to financing where they want to see exactly what is being built.”
The amount each company invested was not disclosed nor was the equity stake that each company would take. Global satellite operator Intelsat stated that it invested US$25m for a minority share.
Qualcomm and Virgin were founding investors in OneWeb when the company was launched at the beginning of 2015. Both Paul Jacobs, executive chairman of Qualcomm, and Richard Branson, founder of the Virgin Group, have seats on the board of OneWeb alongside Greg Wyler. Following this latest investment, they will be joined by Sunil Bharti Mittal, founder and chairman of Bharti Enterprises and Tom Enders, CEO of Airbus. The other investing companies will have board observers.
Barclays acted as exclusive placement agent to OneWeb on the financing.
OneWeb announced on 15 June that it had signed an agreement with Airbus to design and manufacture its first 900 microsatellites that will provide global broadband services. The satellites will be launched in what OneWeb called the largest commercial rocket acquisition ever of more than 65 rockets including 21 Soyuz launch orders from Arianespace and 39 launches from Virgin Galactic’s LauncherOne.
The bulk of these satellites will be launched in 2018 and 2019.
