Sateliot is the Catalan entry in the LEO-IoT sweepstakes, and it markets itself with the same swagger as if it were building a rival to Starlink. In reality it is selling text messages for machines, not broadband for humans. The trick is that its nanosats speak the same 3GPP NB-IoT dialect as terrestrial cell towers, which means a cheap sensor modem in a tractor or shipping container can ping through orbit without swapping hardware. That’s the pitch: seamless roaming for gadgets that don’t know the difference between a tower in Zaragoza and a cubesat at 500 kilometers.

The company has leaned heavily on Brussels’ “sovereign space” mood and Spain’s industrial policy, landing Horizon Europe cash and a parade of press conferences about Europe leading the NTN revolution. What it actually has is a handful of satellites in orbit, a roadmap that stretches to a few dozen, and roaming agreements with mobile operators who like the optics of offering “global IoT coverage” for pennies. It is less a network and more a technical add-on, a line item carriers can bundle without explaining latency windows or pass durations to customers who won’t notice anyway.

The economics are fragile. Narrowband IoT links are measured in cents, not dollars, and margins rely on scale that Sateliot doesn’t yet have. Competitors like OQ Technology, Astrocast, and Swarm are all circling the same pie, and none of them are showing blockbuster revenues. Sateliot compensates with a loud PR machine and an aggressive pitch about being “the first 5G IoT constellation,” as if the adjective makes the satellites any less tiny.

What makes Sateliot interesting is not its tech but its politics. Spain wants a national space success story, the EU wants to sprinkle money across member states, and Sateliot is perfectly positioned to collect both. It may never build more than a modest network, but it will keep showing up in European reports and ESA showcases as proof that Europe can play in direct-to-device without handing everything to American or Chinese companies.

So Sateliot is not the future of satcom, but it is a survivable niche operator. It sells telcos a roaming feature, sells politicians a sovereignty story, and sells investors a growth curve that will always look steeper next year. Whether it ever scales into a proper constellation is secondary. Its real product is narrative, and in Europe that often pays just as reliably as bandwidth.