A specialist in radio frequency detection by satellite, the start-up Unseenlabs has established itself in the field of maritime surveillance. Based in Rennes, this young company is increasing its fundraising and displays ambitions at the border of civil and military space. Focus on the French “New Space”.
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.
It was a first revolution, Clément Galic explains to us: “ Our satellites are antennas in space that can pick up radio frequency 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 starts from three brothers who want 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 attack a market that we know needs new types of data .
This is how we focused on maritime surveillance. This will be of interest to what we call ‘state action at sea’. The main part of our activities is the fight against illegal fishing. So it’s not hard defense, it’s sea policing in fact. And we have the private counterpart which will be the shipowners, the insurers: we will be able to provide them with data which 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 boats, including detecting ships that have cut off their automatic identification system as Russian boats regularly do which stop at the off the coast of Ireland, vertically above a strategic submarine cable.
Adapt the system to any type of transmitter
Building on this know-how, the Rennes company wishes to expand its surveillance capabilities to the terrestrial domain to track jammers, a salient subject particularly 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 what is needed in radio frequency to jam everything that passes around.
From space, we will be able to locate these sources of interference, characterize them and explain to interested parties 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 the jammers. And in fact, the idea is really to replicate this maritime market to any type of market, any type of issuer. We do not have the role of replacing the State, on the other hand, what we bring is a capacity which will cost less to complete or perhaps relieve heritage services, thanks to our data. So it’s complementary “.
Unseenlabs has only one American competitor, and to continue to lead the race, the French nugget plans to launch a fleet of new generation 150 kilo satellites in 2026.
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