Astranis Space Technologies

Astranis was founded in 2015 in San Francisco with a focus on building a new class of small geostationary satellites that dramatically reduce the cost and time required to provide broadband internet from GEO orbit. Traditional GEO communications satellites typically weigh 5,000–6,000 kg, cost $200–300 million to build, and take 5–7 years from contract to service — making broadband-via-satellite inaccessible for smaller operators and underserved regions.

Astranis's MicroGEO platform breaks this paradigm by designing a satellite that weighs approximately 400 kg — roughly 1/10th the mass of a traditional GEO satellite — while delivering up to 10 Gbps of total capacity to a single dedicated customer. The platform is built around software-defined radio (SDR) technology, allowing frequency bands, beam patterns, and power allocation to be reconfigured in orbit to adapt to changing customer demand patterns and spectrum regulations over the satellite's lifetime.

Astranis's first operational customer, Pacific Dataport (for Alaska broadband), successfully launched in 2024, followed by contracts with telecom operators in Mexico and Southeast Asia. The company targets national telecoms, internet service providers, and governments seeking to connect rural populations, maritime routes, or remote industrial operations where terrestrial fiber and 4G/5G are economically unviable. MicroGEO satellites are offered on dedicated full-satellite or hosted-payload bases, giving customers certainty of spectrum and capacity allocation without sharing bandwidth with competing users.