Lynk sells itself as the company that turned your average phone into a satellite terminal, and for once the hype isn’t total vapor. They really did send texts to unmodified handsets from orbit. They really did get FCC approval before anyone else. And they really do have signed deals with mobile operators who like being able to claim “nationwide coverage” without building a single extra tower. The catch, of course, is that Lynk has only a handful of satellites and a business case built on the hope nobody notices how fragile it all is.

The plan is pragmatic to the point of dullness: start with SMS, work up to low-bandwidth data, leave “streaming TikToks from the desert” to the bigger dreamers. That restraint may save them from AST’s habit of promising 5G from orbit before the satellites even work, but it also makes Lynk sound like a cosmic pager service. Not exactly the kind of branding that lures venture capital in 2025.

Money has always been the weak spot. Unlike AST, they don’t have Vodafone or AT&T bankrolling them. Unlike SpaceX, they don’t have a launch company to subsidize them. For a while it looked like Lynk would end up another clever demo swallowed by bankruptcy court. Then SES wandered in with its checkbook. SES not only dropped cash into Lynk’s Series B, it also offered the kind of infrastructure a startup can’t buy: teleport access, command links, and the global sales channels of a serious operator. Intelsat, before being folded into SES, also shoved some money into Lynk, which means the world’s two most jaded GEO incumbents both independently decided this startup was their ticket to relevance. After the merger, that awkward triangle turned into SES investing in itself twice.

That partnership changes the picture. Lynk now has industrial backing, regulatory cover, and a distribution pipeline to governments and MNOs. In other words, it went from insurgent to house pet. Useful, maybe even profitable, but no longer quite as scrappy. SES gets to say it’s in the direct-to-device race without actually inventing anything, and Lynk gets to ride SES’s orbit-clogging bureaucracy to scale. Everyone wins except the competitors who were counting on Lynk to stay small and underfunded.

So Lynk today is less “pirate radio in space” and more “satellite roaming partner with corporate babysitters.” It proved the concept, but whether it becomes a global utility or just a feature baked into SES service packages depends on how long it can keep its identity before the mothership absorbs it entirely. Either way, it’s already done more with a handful of cubesats than most GEO dinosaurs managed with fleets of billion-dollar buses.