Specialist in satellite radio frequency detection, the start-up Unseenlabs has established itself in the field of maritime surveillance. Based in Rennes, this young company is multiplying fundraisings and displays ambitions at the frontier of civil and military space. Focus on the French “New Space”.Rebroadcast from May 12, 2024.
Attention nugget! Unseenlabs was born ten years ago. The Galic brothers, Clément Benjamin and Jonathan seized the opportunities offered by nano satellites to detect and locate any vessel at sea with extreme precision thanks to its electromagnetic emissions.
This was a first revolution, Clément Galic explains to us: “ Our satellites are antennas in space that can pick up radiofrequency signals. This is an area that was reserved. It was the preserve of defense – for hard defense – until we decided in 2015 to open this market to the world of civil security and the private sector.
So, it all started with three brothers who wanted to try the space adventure, to place in orbit an instrument capable of locating the sources of radio frequency emissions. We said to ourselves: we are engineers but we are creating a private company that will have to make money, let’s try at least initially, to tackle a market that we know needs new types of data.
That’s how we focused on maritime surveillance. It will be of interest to what we call ‘state action at sea’. For us, the main part of our activities is the fight against illegal fishing. So it’s not hard defense, it’s actually maritime policing. And we have the private counterpart which will be the shipowners, the insurers: we will be able to provide them with data that will provide more detailed information on the reality of maritime traffic. “.
With their technology and their constellation of 13 nano-satellites, Unseenlabs engineers can map the position of ships, including detecting vessels that have cut their automatic identification system, as Russian ships regularly do when they stop off the coast of Ireland, vertically above a strategic undersea cable.
Adapt the system to any type of transmitter
With this expertise, the Rennes-based company wants to expand its surveillance capabilities to the terrestrial domain to track jammers, a key issue in particular in Ukraine where anti-drone jamming is omnipresent.
” A jammercontinues Clément Galic, CEO of Unseenlabs, It’s a big machine, which is a big truck that sends out enough radio frequency to jam everything that passes around it.
From space, we will be able to locate these jamming sources, characterize them and explain to those concerned how to counter-jam, in order to be able to act. Today, what we do is locate boats, and we will do the same thing for jammers. And in fact, the idea is really to replicate this maritime market to any type of market, any type of transmitter. We do not have the role of replacing the State, on the other hand, what we bring is a capacity that will cost less to supplement or perhaps relieve heritage services, thanks to our data. So it is complementary “.
Unseenlabs has only one American competitor, and to continue to lead the race, the French nugget is planning to launch a fleet of 150 kilo new generation satellites in 2026.
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