Britain's answer to Starlink opens $50 million raise to fund Kent factory and first commercial network in Southeast Asia

Avealto, the British company developing high-altitude platform station (HAPS) aircraft to bring broadband connectivity to underserved regions, has opened a $50 million funding round to finance a new UK manufacturing facility, a full-scale prototype demonstration and its first commercial network deployment, in Southeast Asia, over the next 12 to 18 months.

Avealto's aircraft are solar-powered and hold station at 20 kilometres, above weather and commercial air traffic, for months at a time. Each covers 45,000 square kilometres, roughly the footprint of a small country, delivering capacity direct to a telecom operator's own network rather than competing with it for customers. That wholesale-only design lets Avealto price at around 80 per cent below the wholesale cost of satellite capacity, aimed squarely at the estimated three billion people worldwide without adequate internet access, a market satellite economics were never built to serve at scale.

The company has secured a factory site at Lydd Airport in Kent, bringing export-led manufacturing and 40 to 50 high-skilled engineering jobs onshore from day one. A full-scale prototype has already flown, and a public demonstration is scheduled for September 2026 in Wales. Commercially, Avealto has progressed talks with Malaysian telecom operators, building on a memorandum of understanding signed with Indonesian partners in 2023, positioning Southeast Asia as the company's first live commercial market.

The raise lands against a backdrop that has sharpened the case for a wholesale alternative to satellite. Starlink has this month raised prices by 40 to 44 per cent for rural customers with no other option and confirmed plans to launch a retail mobile service in the US in direct competition with the telecom operators that have historically been its wholesale customers. Avealto's model is built to make that conflict of interest structurally impossible: it supplies operators, not their customers, and always will.

Walt Anderson, CEO of Avealto, said: “Satellite was never going to connect the next three billion people. The economics don't work at that price point, and they were never designed to. We chose to build in Britain because this technology needed proven aviation engineering, not experimental physics, and the UK has both the aerospace expertise and the skilled workforce to deliver it at scale.

“Our aircraft are solar-powered. There are no rocket launches, no debris left in orbit, and none of the particulates that satellites shed into the upper atmosphere when they burn up on re-entry every few years to keep a constellation running. We land, service and refly the same aircraft instead of discarding it, which is a fundamentally cleaner way to build connectivity infrastructure than a satellite constellation.

“This funding lets us finish what we've started in Kent, put a full-scale prototype in the sky over Wales, and open our first commercial network in Southeast Asia. Starlink has just shown every telecom operator what happens when your supplier decides to become your competitor. We built Avealto so that decision can never be made against the people who rely on us.”