Abel Avellan

Chairman & CEO

Abel Avellan is the founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of AST SpaceMobile, the company building a space-based cellular broadband network that connects directly to standard mobile phones. He founded the company in May 2017; it is headquartered in Midland, Texas, and listed on Nasdaq. Born in Venezuela and a US citizen, he holds a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from Simón Bolívar University. He began his career at Ericsson, then founded Emerging Markets Communications (EMC), a satellite communications services provider, in 2000 and served as its CEO until it was sold to Global Eagle Entertainment for $550 million in July 2016. He then served as president and chief strategy officer of Global Eagle until April 2017. He is a co-inventor of 24 US patents, and received Euroconsult's Satellite Transaction of the Year award in 2015 and the World Teleport Association's Satellite Teleport Executive of the Year award in 2017.