Over time, more and more attention has been paid to the issue of satellite and spacecraft collisions in low Earth orbit (LEO). Magnestar, a new company in Toronto is looking to address an underappreciated potential problem for increasingly crowded satellite constellations: space-to-ground signal bandwidth.
The company is headed by former OMERS (Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System) Data & Technology Director Jacqueline Good and Magnestar it’s looking to resolve this problem by creating a whole new kind of database, and a whole new kind of market: the “clearing house for signals.”
In an interview with SpaceQ, Good gave more details.
Predicting Signal Interference
Good describes Magnestar as a solution for a growing problem. Companies are becoming more and more reliant on space-based communications and Earth observation to be able to do business. As satellite-to-satellite communications is still in its infancy, satellites rely on space-to-ground RF communications. Bandwidth is limited, though, and satellite operators (and their customers) regularly encounter situations where there can be conflicts or interference between satellites’ radio signals.
As Good said: “We reached out to as many space sector companies as possible, and we heard that space services heavily rely on signal…and signal is a scarce resource that’s prone to interference.” Not only does interference create issues, but due to the sheer number of satellites in LEO now, it can be extremely difficult to predict when these conflicts may take place. Even though private-sector satellite-tracking is getting better, thanks to companies like LeoLabs, that may not help with signal interference.
Magnestar is proposing to create a system that can track and even predict these conflicts, and then help to resolve them. It uses a combination of confidential information sources to build a dataset containing a wide variety of current and upcoming satellite signals. After collecting the data, Good said, Magnestar uses machine learning algorithms to analyze the dataset and flag potential conflicts. Once they’ve discovered the potential conflicts, Magnestar can reach out to space operators, warning them about the issue well before it happens.
Good said that they’re “working on having the most accurate, real time spectrum intelligence information on the market.”
As they take on clients, they plan to also collect information from clients on their satellites and their scheduled transmissions, to refine and improve their dataset and their predictions. Good said that operators were aware of the issue, but that they were having difficulty resolving it; they “really wanted a separate third party group, to be able to aggregate this proprietary information, ingest it, secure it, and ensure that it has the appropriate security measures without touching each other’s data in any way.”
Good said that resolving this coordination problem in a way that protects data security is one of Magnestar’s major priorities, and that they would spare no effort to ensure that clients’ proprietary or sensitive information would remain protected.
A Market for Signals
Once the conflicts have been identified, and the operators contacted, Magnestar will be positioned to provide several different solutions. One option is rerouting one of the signals; either the satellite will contact a different ground station, or (where technologically available) will reroute the signal through a different satellite. The other option is through rapid spectrum leasing; where one of the operators temporarily leases spectrum from another (whether the other party to the conflict, or another operator altogether) to avoid the conflict. These leases could be short, measured in minutes or even seconds, taking advantage of the sporadic and intermittent nature of many satellite communications.
A big part of Magnestar’s plans is facilitating this process. After building the data set, they intend to use it to build a “clearing house for signals,” where operators can rapidly (and potentially automatically) lease this capacity to each other in order to avoid conflicts. The “clearing house” term isn’t really a metaphor: Good sees the spare bandwidth and spectrum as a potential market, and Magnestar as a facilitation tool for clearing that market.
She described it as “an AirBnB for signals.” She said that it’s modeled on AirBnB’s disruptive effect on the hospitality market, and that “we’re building in the same type of infrastructure for spectrum, enabling the technology to [allow] all satellite operators to be able to monetize their excess spectrum. But it was very important that we built the clearing house first, so that spectrum subleased through the platform won’t interfere with others.”
In addition to likening it to AirBnB, she also said that she thinks of it as being similar to the NASDAQ in enabling space startups. “When new operators are coming on board and trying to get faster access to spectrum, we’re positioning the technology to be able to provide that function, similar to the NASDAQ…the NASDAQ is the trading platform in which stocks are traded [and] we see [our platform] being built very similarly within the spectrum community.”
Magnestar’s Team
Good believes that she’s uniquely suited to building this market. Thanks to a combination of on-the-job skill development and continuing education, including successful tenures focused on facilitating high-speed trading solutions with OMERS and with financial infrastructure provider TIBCO, she’s developed a skill set focused on building and optimizing the infrastructure that enables high-speed markets exactly like the one that Magnestar is looking to build.
Her small nine-person team has a number of space and infrastructure experts as well, complimenting her own skill set: including Space Concordia alum Michael O’Meara, who serves as Technical Lead; Senior Space Software Developer John L. Russell, formerly of RWDI Ventures and Orbital Stack; and “DevOps Maestro” Ian Service, who was the Director of Digital Infrastructure for Landscape Ontario and serves as Magnestar’s Director of Infrastructure; and Dr. Paul LaForge, a University of Regina Associate Professor in Electronic Systems Engineering, who’s partnering with the company as a sensor specialist.
The company is actively recruiting. Good’s profile on LinkedIn even says “hiring!” in the profile picture. Despite the oft-repeated challenges of finding talent in the space sector, she said that there’s a lot of enthusiasm among applicants, and that “a lot of people dream of working in space, and a lot of business minded individuals know that one of the best ways to generate meaningful wealth is through joining an early stage, venture scalable company that offers equity.”
Founding, Funding and Accelerating
Building out all the infrastructure and tools needed, however, will take serious investment. So will hiring the people to help Magnestar to do it. Good has been resolute on gaining the knowledge and skills needed to become the kind of space company founder that investors can trust in this difficult market.
In preparation for her transition to building a space-focused company, Good spent time at the International Space University, where she was sponsored by the European Space Agency to study space engineering. She said that “it was an amazing experience…they really focus on training you for space. I was able to work on a 3D printing project with folks from NASA, dive into engineering for space and ended up connecting with one of our key advisors, Grant Anderson.” She said that “[w]e built a very strong community within our class, they continue to encourage me and inspire me everyday.”
The company was built and developed at Entrepreneur First, where Good was an Founder-in-Residence and the only solo founder funded through the TO2 cohort. Magnestar won $100,000 in initial funding during their time at EF, after winning “Best Pitch” and “Best of the Fest” at Montreal’s StartupFest in June of 2022. Good wrote about her experiences in an article on LinkedIn, and how it involved “countless pitches to different investor groups and networking among early stage companies in beautiful Montreal”.
The pitching and networking during and after the festival paid off. By the end of 2022, Magnestar had concluded a $1.1m pre-seed funding round involving the Business Development Bank of Canada, 1862 Capital, and BoxOne Ventures, as well as Entrepreneur First. Good said that a seed round would be starting soon, “likely commencing in the next few months.”
She said that Magnestar had recently finished a 3-month early accelerator program with TechStars, which was sponsored by the Saudi Space Commission, giving her the opportunity to develop connections with operators in the Middle East. She said that “I’ve worked in Asia, I’ve worked in Europe, and I’ve worked in North America…so I saw it as a great opportunity to gain some experience and first hand knowledge of working in the Middle East.”
Magnestar is also part of the Creative Destruction Lab’s most recent Space Stream accelerator cohort. While she couldn’t go into detail due to CDL’s confidentiality rules, she was able to say that “we passed session three, which is fantastic, and have one more session left in April. Fingers crossed.”
Finally, when discussing hiring, she emphasized the interest that young people now have in space travel. She relayed a story of when she was at OMERS, she asked students at business schools how many of them wanted to go to space. She said “70% of them put their hands up…the desire to go to space is massively growing.” She named that as a “tipping point” for her decision to transition to space entrepreneurship.
She said she counted herself among one of them, and acknowledged that that had influenced her choice of companies. “I think that within the next 20 to 50 years, this is going to be a real possibility. So we need to make sure that [space travellers] are safe, and that they have clear communication pathways back to Earth to ensure that safety.”
Recently Magnestar won the 7th annual Startup Space Competition at Satellite 2023 becoming the first Canadian company to do so.