, is aiming to create an array of hundreds of satellites to deliver a kind of private, unhackable internet that he has dubbed “The OuterNet”.
In the first three months of 2024, Terran received just $1.7 million from Rivada, which comes on top of the $6.9 million it booked in total revenue from Ganley’s company in 2023, as disclosed in a previous set of financial statements. He acknowledged that Rivada’s $1.7 million payment was “a modest contributor to our first-quarter revenue”, but noted “we have agreed in principle on a payment schedule that we believe will keep the programme on track and make the launch timetable”.
For example, towards the end of 2023 Bell of Terran hinted that funding had been lined up. He said so in several different forums, sometimes to Terran staff in company town halls, sometimes to analysts on investor calls. At one point he was quoted as saying that a “large sovereign that has not yet publicly announced their support for the project” and insisting that the company had “done extreme due diligence on financials”.
Around that time, as it happens, there was an indication of some fundraising activity buried in the company filings of an obscure Irish subsidiary called Rivada Networks Limited. That unit published in late December a number of company filings recording a fundraising round led by an entity called Dukhan Investment Company, with the implication that there were several other investors in the round.
In response to specific questioning of Rivada’s funding by a shareholder, Bell, perhaps a little archly, noted that Terran has plenty of other customers and wasn’t exclusively reliant on Rivada. But, as he had done a number of times on the call, he directed the investor to put any such funding questions to Rivada.
As a consequence, he said: “We think Terran investors are heavily limiting the Rivada opportunity in their valuation of Terran until visibility improves around the contract.” “That first deadline is now less than two years away and it’s pretty inconceivable you could go from nothing to 300 satellites in orbit in less than two years,” he said.