Pong
Satellites need ground stations, and ground stations need land, precisely what's missing where the coverage gaps are. Building them means acquiring sites, negotiating spectrum country by country, and waiting years for each one. Pong puts the ground segment on ships and offshore platforms instead: mobile infrastructure already spread across the oceans, operating under a simpler regulatory path in international waters. Ground-segment-as-a-service for operators who need coverage where no terrestrial network reaches.
About the partner
I spent my early twenties trying to become an astronaut. Two Mars mission simulations in the Utah desert, one zero-g flight and one stratospheric balloon experiment later, I'm an engineer instead, with a PhD in plasma physics. What survived is the conviction that the most interesting problems left are physical ones.
I co-founded ScanWorld, building agricultural analytics on satellite imagery, and exited it to constellr. It taught me that in hardware the physics is almost never the bottleneck. Finding the customer who actually pays is. I then moved into nuclear energy, where I played a key incubator role in creating three companies across fission, fusion and defense. That's where my thesis took shape: betting on science and betting on engineering execution are very different games, and nearly all deeptech capital goes to the first.
At Hexa I co-build hardware companies from day zero. What I bring as founder is someone who will read your thermal model and your cap table in the same afternoon, and help you get a prototype in front of a paying customer in months rather than years.
I'm Belgian, with a Dutch grandfather who passed down a certain scrappiness philosophy. I live in Brussels with my wife and three kids.
Ready to build it?
This opportunity is part of Hexa Start, our startup studio program where partners originate ideas and founders build them. If this resonates, reach out directly to the partner behind it or apply through our founder application form.