Pierre Betrand, Skynopy CEO, left, and CTO Antonin Hirsch, right. Photo: Skynopy

French startup Skynopy, which hopes to make connectivity-as-a-service a commercial reality, could close a number of deals this year ahead of expectations. The company, which is led by CEO Pierre Bertrand, and CTO Antonin Hirsch, both former directors at Loft Orbital, recently closed another $3.1 million in funding. In an interview with Via Satellite, Bertrand said the company has already signed three contracts and has sent a further five commercial proposals being under consideration.

“The contracts we have signed have been with satellite operators, integrators that want to improve their connectivity setup,” Bertrand says. “The choice of the right hardware, the right set of ground stations, and then helping choosing the right modulation and protocols. These are the ones we have signed and we have a number of proposals out there. This is for in-orbit operations with a set of ground stations we are currently managing. If we get the contracts for the five proposals we have sent, it will be beyond expectation.”

He describes Skynopy as “connectivity-as-a-service.” Skynopy aims to offer a seamless, simplified and worldwide service for satellite operators to connect their satellites and send commands and receive data using its hybrid network of ground antennas.

“Within the next five years, we believe satellites will need to be operated like mobile phones. People operating satellites will want to focus on their mission. They don’t want to internalize the complexity of the connectivity. It is as if Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) is becoming new territory where you have a whole bunch of new players coming in selling services like refueling, labs in orbit, operating satellites. What we want to provide is to be the telecom operator of this new territory.”

Bertrand and Hirsch both worked at Loft Orbital, and the influence of the Loft Orbital business model is clear. Skynopy aims to take it a stage further.

“Today, it is easier and easier to launch satellite in to orbit. It is also easier and easier to buy satellites, and you have companies like Loft doing satellite-as-a-service. But when it comes to ground stations and connectivity, the same does not apply and the market stayed on an outdated paradigm. Some players are providing ground stations as a service, turning capital expenditure into operating expenditure for their customers, which is great but not sufficient. It allows all of the market to exist but not to thrive,” Bertrand says.

It even goes beyond just being seen as ground station-as-a-service company. Bertrand adds, “We come to the market with an end-to-end vision. So, we want to have a network of ground stations and ground stations-as-a-service but we need to go much longer term and look at true connectivity-as-a-service rather than just ground-station-as-a-service.”

He says in the coming years the satellite industry’s bottleneck will be the pipe to download data. Even aside from vertically integrated Amazon Kuiper and SpaceX Starlink, there are a huge number of players launching that will all produce data.

Despite the fact it is a French company, the U.S. is one of the main target markets for Skynopy as well as nation-states looking to develop a space capability.

“There is a need for space emerging nations to internalize/externalize connectivity. These nations are funding their first satellites, and ideally, they would like to have their own ground station to operate on your territory. Having said that, having one ground station is not enough to operate your own satellite, especially if you are on the equatorial side, because you won’t speak to it very often. You need to rely on a network but you don’t have enough money to buy a network,” says Bertrand.

Bertrand says regulation and a crowded marketplace is the biggest obstacle to Skynopy’s success.

“The market is crowded. We have super strong competition. We have tried to raise money very fast, so we can focus on execution, so to hire fast, to be able to plug our core software to a lot of ground stations. We have a number of ground stations already with our software. The other thing that can be quite challenging is regulation, so the license to operate ground stations. We see that it is a different timeline. There is one timeline that is one you can’t really accelerate and that is regulation, and that is definitely a challenge. It is something we want to address. The quality of relationships is key,” Bertrand says.

While the company has raised funding recently, the funding environment for startups is also difficult. Bertrand recalls that he left his role at Loft Orbital the day that Silicon Valley Bank failed. He says that while the fundraising was “tough and intense,” the company raised twice as much as it originally planned.

“I thought that was ironically an extreme bad sense of timing to quit your current job and start your own company,” he says. “The period has of course been difficult to raise compared to the 2018-2022 period. Our first fundraising was key.”

By the end of 2025, Skynopy hopes be operating 15 ground stations all over the world and have grown the team to 30 people. Bertrand says the company is preparing R&D projects to bring about the next level of innovation for the business model and technology including ground station topology and ground antenna topology.

“We are not just a space company,” he says. “We see ourselves as a company that is in the middle of three circles, space, ground telecoms and cloud technologies. We need to address the different partners in the different circles if we want to thrive.”