Why I joined Swarm

I’m excited to announce that I’ve joined Swarm, a company dedicated to making connectivity possible AND affordable everywhere on Earth through its cell-phone-sized satellites.

When I started my career during the tech boom of the late ’90s, I had no idea that my journey would take me to the stars. Well, perhaps not that far (yet), but at least to low-Earth orbit. I’ve watched the connection between people and devices start on the ground, rise to the cloud, and has now ascended to an even higher plane...all the way to space!

Technology has come a long way since the days of Sputnik. On the one hand, we have satellites like the monumental Hubble Space Telescope that look out into the universe. On the other, we have satellites that can sit in the palm of your hand—ones that look back at our planet and connect people and devices around the world. And that’s the buzz about Swarm.

As the range and number of IoT applications grow ever larger—by some estimates, more than 75 billion IoT devices will come online by 2025—there’s an increasing demand for affordable connectivity, especially given that 90 percent of the world is not covered by cellular service or Wi-Fi. Swarm fills the gap in remote regions that lack reliable access to the Internet. Our service specifically focuses on low-bandwidth use cases, such as asset tracking and sensor monitoring. We also offer an affordable hardware product and data service that allows data transfer to occur anywhere on Earth at all times.?

Needless to say, Swarm is here to improve lives, which is why I’m so excited to be part of the team. I could name dozens of reasons why I joined Swarm, but I’ve distilled them down to the three most important ones. Here’s why I am all in on Swarm!

1. Swarm is a small (and fun) team with big dreams, but we have already accomplished big things.

The company is four years old, has 33 employees, and has already designed, built, launched, and operated satellites. We do everything in-house: hardware, software, regulatory, sales, finance, marketing, etc. None of this is “catalog engineering,” as they call it. This is all our stuff, and I’m beyond impressed.

Speaking of that product, it’s the world’s smallest two-way communication satellite—1/4Us, 11 x 11 x 2.8 cm—or some 1000x smaller than most existing communications satellites. The small satellite size is possible due to our novel attitude-control scheme and spreading scheme, magnetorquer attitude control, and propulsion system for orbital control. It enables unique economics that allow us to sell our connectivity services at substantially lower prices than our competitors.

We at Swarm have also developed our own state-of-the-art protocol to achieve data transfer at extremely low power and low frequency, which allows our signals to propagate long distances, through rain and weather, through foliage, and at low angles near the horizon, providing better coverage and connectivity for all.

Did I mention that all this was all accomplished in-house by a team of just a few dozen people?! In my eyes, that makes everyone here a legend.

2. Because of this successful product, Swarm already has real, recurring revenue.

I've worked at some companies where we raised over $90 million, and we still couldn't get our customers to install the product...I've seen some tremendously terrible situations. But that’s not at all the case with Swarm.

We’ve raised $35M total and secured funding from multiple ongoing programs and contracts. Our VC backers are Social Capital, Craft Ventures, 4DX Ventures, and NJF Capital.

With that, we’ve been able to launch more than 120 Swarm satellites to orbit so far, covering 100 percent of the globe (even Santa is a customer!). We already have hundreds of clients across many industries, including agriculture, maritime, energy, transportation & logistics, environment, and global development.?

I can’t overstate how impressive it is that such a small team has created all this intellectual property that simply works right, especially in an environment as challenging as space. From my experience working in all sorts of startups, I also believe that all the work Swarm has already done is scalable (which is not the case at many young companies), meaning there’s limitless room for growth as we expand our business.

3. Swarm is only going to get even bigger and better from here.

We’re going to continue to grow and improve our main product—most recently, we launched end-to-end secure architecture where messages are encrypted—but we’re also going to develop entirely new products, too. In fact, Swarm just released its new Self Eval Kit, a portable solar-powered device that consumers can use to send and receive messages, share GPS coordinates, or even post small updates to social media (like tweets) anywhere in the world at affordable price points. (The kit costs $499, while a data plan for 750 “packets” costs $5 per month.)

So it’s not just big businesses that we’re serving here at Swarm. We’re here to help independent customers with their connectivity needs, too.

Even though it’s only been a couple of weeks, I already love my team at Swarm—and I can’t wait for the big things our company has in store.

If you’re looking to ride this exciting wave with us, helping to usher in a new era of global connectivity for all, check out our job opportunities at Swarm. We can’t wait to meet you!