Kineis Director-General Alexandre Tisserant. Credit: Kineis
PARIS — The French government-backed Kineis satellite IoT/M2M startup, which has struggled in the past 8 months to secure the needed $120 million in estimated capex, appears to have turned the corner with the adhesion of two large customer sets.
The two customers are French telco Bouygues Telecom’s Objenious by Bouygues program, part of the LoRa Alliance including on-board systems designer Stycker and IoT platform builder Wisebatt; and the WIZE Alliance including Suez, GRDF, Sagemcom and Accenture.
It is unclear whether the two groups are investing in Kineis. But their in-principle commitment as large customers was enough to secure a funding round enabling Kineis to sign Authorization-to-Proceed contracts with the Kineis industrial team.
The ATPs will be signed with Nexeya/Hemeria as platform provider and Thales Alenia Space (TAS) as satellite payload prime.
The French space agency, CNES, had already agreed to be among the early Kineis investors and has viewed the project as a showcase of French NewSpace potential.
The addition of established French industrial giants to Kineis’s customer set is almost certain to change the correlation of forces between Kineis and the ELO project backed by satellite-fleet operator Eutelsat and land-based IoT provider Sigfox, who together are planning their own IoT constellation.
Kineis’s original backer was CLS of Toulouse, France, a CNES affiliate that manages the Argos program of satellite sensors that track wildlife worldwide.
The CLS idea was to merge its long history in satellite animal tracking with a global IoT platform for land and maritime users: http://bit.ly/2UK2F67
Kineis Chief Executive Alexandre Tisserant discussed the importance of the new customer deals.
What do these two groups want from Kineis?
Bouygues Telecom, which is part of the LoRa alliance, is interested in building a hybrid  satellite/terrestrial telecom network.
The WIZE Alliance, with Suez and GRDF, the energy companies, already uses terrestrial technologies for automatic meter reading and want to add onto that a satellite solution.
Why is Bouygues, a telco, interested in your narrowband solution?
Today there are large industrial sites spread around the world, with spare parts produced at these different sites before being assembled into systems in Europe or elsewhere.
Nexeya/Hemeria’s Laurent Javanaud in front of a mockup of the ANGELS cubesat, a co-investment of Nexeya and the French space agency, CNES, to be launched in late 2019. Credit: CNES via Youtube
The component owners need to follow them while in transit, because sometimes the get lost. So this is a way to optimize the supply chain.
What they use today is essentially a terrestrial solution, which is low-cost but also less autonomous than they would like. They really need something hybrid, and Bouygues Telecom approached us to become part of what we are doing.
And the WIZE Alliance with Suez, GRDF, Sagemcom and Accenture?
That came almost as a surprise for us. It demonstrates the enormous potential of Kineis. Suez does a lot of energy distribution as wel as automatic reading of its meters. One might think this is done well enough with terrestrial networks.
In fact, no. Suez tells us that even in France, 90% of their network is connected via the terrestrial solutions, leaving 5-10% that do not work with terrestrial networks. And 5%-10% is important to them. If you have 5,000 or 10,000 points that cannot be captured by the network in a given region, that means having to send technicians out each month to read the meters. Comparing the cost of that to having a satellite solution, we can save hem a substantial amount.
We have other industrial partnerships in the works, but these two seemed particularly important to highlight. Bouygues already has a connectivity network but realizes it needs satellite to complement its offer. Suez and GRDF are large industrial companies who want to develop this as well.
These are both big players. What was Kineis’s special appeal to them?
First is that they want a solution that works right away. We can launch our satellites in three years to reinforce our position. The fact that we already have satellites in orbit that function with the Argos technology was a strong argument that attracted them to us.
They know we already have something that works. We have 20,000 Argos buoys in the field. We are not starting with just a concept, even on the satellite side.
Is there an overlap in the territories of  Bouygues and WIZE?
We have two very different partnerships with them. They are two players with distinct and separate activities. WIZE will use it for its own industrial requirements. For them it is an internal demand they have.
For Bouygues, it is an offer they will make available for their different industrial partners around the world.
And the technologies are not exactly the same. WIZE wants VHF band, and Bouygues wants to make a combined offer with the LoRa alliance in that band around 800 MHz. So it’s not the same technologies.
WIZE is mainly for fixed applications and meter reading. Bouygues is for mobile applications.
You need 100-120 million euros to fund development. Where are you now?
I cannot give financing levels now because we are completing our cap table and until it’s finished I can’t disclose amounts. But I can tell you that with the support we have now we are starting the industrial project and have committed to start work with our industrial partners.
You can imagine that we would not do this if we had empty pockets. We have enough confidence in this financing to be able to start the industrial work.
Normally when one talks of strategic partnerships, that means investment.
We have strategic and commercial partnerships. They are strategic in the sense that without them we would not do the project.
You are starting with 25 satellites in a single order?
Yes. Initially we wanted to build 20 satellites right away and then launch five or 10 more after four or five years. The work we have done since then on the satellites’ likely lifespan, plus the launch question, have led us to a solution where we launch 25 satellites right away — five orbital planes of five satellites each.
With that we have enough to assure a constellation life of eight years.
We are now planning an orbit of 650 kilometers. Each satellite has a life expectancy of 6-8 years, and since we need 20 satellites to do the mission, we launch 25 from the start and that gives us enough to maintain the constellation for eight years.
TAS does the payload and Hemeria (the former Nexeya) is building the platform. Has the role of TAS changed since the original plan?
We did reorganize the project. Kineis manages the entire program and we are reinforcing our team with engineers, notably from CNES, and we contract with Thales Alenia Space for the ground segment and with Nexeya for the platform and for the integration. But it’s Kineis that is the pilot of the program.
The ANGELS satellite will demonstrate some of your technologies. What is its status?
It is on schedule for a launch mid-October this year and it is obviously important for proving part of our technology, including industrial engineering behind ANGELS for what needed to be miniaturized on the satellite. That work is pretty much behind us now, which helps us start Kineis today. We have debugged much of the system with ground testing.
There is of course the in-orbit data on the performance of the platform that will be important for us, and that timing works well: Assuming an October launch of ANGELS, we at Kineis will complete the PDR by the end of the year. So that works well in terms of timing.
If the launch is delayed, will that affect your timing?
I don’t think so. We are not that worried about a couple of months. The most important thing with ANGELS is the miniaturization . Flight results will be needed to fine-tune certain aspects, and we have time to do that.