6.2023-London-TrustPoint

PATRICK SHANNON: All right, I'll just go ahead and get started here. I apologize for this. If anyone would like a copy of these slides without the font issues, I can do so to you individually or as a larger group after the event.

My name is Patrick Shannon. I am CEO and founder of TrustPoint. I'm also an MIT graduate. I studied in the AeroAstro department, and I spent a majority of my career working in satellite telecommunications. I'm going to talk to you today a little bit about TrustPoint and what we're doing in the global navigation satellite services space.

What you would have been able to read here is what TrustPoint is in a single sentence. We are a fully commercial, next-generation global navigation satellite service system and capability provider with an idea to improve upon performance accuracy primarily, but also security, availability, and reliability of timing and positioning services, all with an eye towards autonomous navigation, critical infrastructure, and national security applications that currently have significant pain points in this space.

As a company, we've been operating for about two years. We've got a team of 10 spread across both the east and west coast of the United States. We have garnered a little bit of venture capital interest but, more importantly, US government traction, with over 700k in government contracts granted in a very short lifetime as a business.

Most importantly, even though we're US-based, we're very much a global-first company, and we have our eye on a beachhead here in Europe, particularly due to some of the pain points that are a little more tangible in the GPS GNSS space, most notably along the Russian border. And so I'll talk a little bit more about how that plays in, but we are supporting quite a few different applications, only one or two of which I'll talk to you today.

This is also a little unfortunate. If only it was a different font and not little characters.

So as most folks know, GPS and GNSS, it supports a ton of different things, everything from automotive, anything transportation-related. It is critical to our way of life and the global economy. And while it works very well for a lot of applications, there's still a ton of pain points, partially because of how old the systems are, when they were architected, and the backwards compatibility that keeps them from innovating too quickly. The two that are super important that I want to talk to today are actually-- and you can't read them-- but wireless networks, particularly in the IT space, 5G, eventually 6G, data centers, edge compute, and then other critical infrastructure like power grids.

This is tough. Going by the pictures here, there's a topic with related to the IT and infrastructure side and the 5G in particular with regards to using GNSS for time and synchronization of 5G base stations, eventually 6G as well. We have moved from large cell towers and rooftop-based cell systems to street-level small cell deployments. These radio units, both the old and the new, need GNSS time for time synchronization for a number of different reasons. But in urban areas, it's very difficult to get the accuracy from the heritage systems. Part of that's due to where the spacecraft are, what the signal structure looks like, and their frequency choices.

You have two inherent problems in that. One is reflected signals that unfortunately cause inadvertent interference to a user. The other one is just obfuscation of the sky. So you can't actually see the GNSS satellites, whether that's the US GPS system or the European Galileo system.

And due to that, you end up having to do some pretty costly alternatives, whether that's buying into a chip scale atomic clock for your network to get that synchronization held or, and you see this often, kind of tunneling through a building and putting your GPS antenna on the roof. Now that last activity is actually quite expensive, more so than almost anything else related to the deployment of a network node-- can be orders of magnitude more than the actual hardware of the network node itself. So it becomes a cost driver often in some of the 5G deployments.

The other one-- and again, I apologize here-- the other one is security. And GNSS as a whole is actually one of the last remaining unencrypted public services the world uses. And we all use it many times a day. You're probably each carrying between 1 and 4 GNSS receivers on you right now. And they're receiving unencrypted signals. That, along with SMS texting, is the other last remaining unencrypted service. And with that in mind, these are the same services that are synchronizing our cell networks. They're synchronizing our data centers. They are operating our energy networks. And for that reason, it's pretty unfortunate that that's the case.

Now historically, it wasn't a big deal because it would take a nation-state actor to kind of spoof and jam those particular users. However, today that's no longer the case. And for a few hundred US dollars, you can buy equipment to do just that. And so you've seen a proliferation of these instances globally, both due to nation-state actors-- Russia and China in particular-- however, also less so middle schoolers and high schoolers using it for augmented reality outdoor games, instead sitting on their couches using $300 Chinese spoofers to not have to leave the house.

So these are issues, and there's an additional issue as it pertains to the United Kingdom, in so far as the UK is no longer a part of the Galileo program. Galileo, being the European GNSS system, being a part of that program allows certain accesses to encrypted services and other high-security capabilities. That's no longer the case for the UK. And so there's even, I guess, a recession of capability following Brexit.

Now what is TrustPoint doing? And I apologize for going slightly long here, but at least we have English words on the slide. The first point has a two-part solution. And the first one is very low cost infrastructure. The GPS program for the last 20 years has cost the US government about $25 billion to build the space and ground segments.

At TrustPoint, we're innovating with software to solve problems that have historically been solved in hardware to allow us to reduce the cost by 250x. That's a savings of 99.6% on your infrastructure expenses. So we can deploy a constellation for less than $100 million to provide these types of services, enabled mostly by new software applications.

We combine that with new signal structures and new frequencies. Those two things coming together give us something that is very high availability. So there's a 30x reduction in loss of service in cities based on simulations. We're very jam resistant. We're also low-cost, high-precision, and most importantly, we have embedded security from the start.

We also have already launched our first satellite, even though we've been in business for only two years. It launched about two months ago. We have another one going up in a couple of months. And over the life of the business, we'll be launching over 300 spacecraft, but at a very affordable, rather quick rate.

Just to wrap it up and a few things, I did want to show a quick simulation of what services look like today versus what they can look like with TrustPoint's fully-deployed service. And we did a simulation in downtown San Francisco next to Salesforce Tower. If you had a base station or an edge compute IT center at street level, looking for GNSS-based time and synchronization, if you were to use GPS only, just the US system, you're looking at an availability of service on the order of 65%. So you only have capability 2/3 of the time. If you had the European service, that goes up to the mid-80s. And if you had TrustPoint, it goes up to 97.5%.

Now those numbers seem kind of incremental or only marginal gains by adding a different service, but more important is actually the outages time due to the increased availability. And we're seeing a 30x reduction in the mean average service outages and a 10x reduction in the 2-sigma outages. And that translates to cost savings because you no longer have to spend a ton of money on expensive oscillators and other timekeeping devices to maintain time through those outages.

And with that mentioned, I'm here in the UK. We're actually attending a couple of different events this week. My business partner's across town at another one. And we're here to meet customers, in particular to discuss pilot programs. We'll have enough satellites on orbit in first half of next year to provide some initial demonstration capability, and we'd love to talk to anyone that happens to be in the 5G data center space, but also the mobility space, which I didn't talk about, but we do a lot in as well. Thank you very much.