Swarm continues to aim skyward one year after SpaceX deal

It has been almost one year since Elon Musk’s SpaceX completed its acquisition of Swarm Technologies, a company using very small satellites to provide Internet of Things connectivity to remote geographies. While SpaceX has yet to provide details for how Swarm figures into its grand plan, Swarm’s co-founder feels the companies are working well together and that Swarm has benefited.

Sara Spangelo, who co-founded Swarm with Benjamin Longmier, and is now senior director of satellite engineering at SpaceX, said the deal has proven to be an “accelerator” for Swarm, which already has more than 150 of its grilled cheese sandwich-sized satellite in low Earth orbit, and is lining up more satellite launches with SpaceX to occur over the next few years.

“We’re able to do more at SpaceX,” she told Fierce Electronics. “We're able to have an even bigger impact on these connectivity solutions being at a bigger place with more resources. So it's really been an incredible opportunity.”

SpaceX also has been benefiting from Swarm’s expertise, as Spangelo noted that Longmier worked on new thruster technology for SpaceX, and that Swarm also “has been working on” the direct-to-cellular connectivity solution that Starlink, SpaceX’s satellite Internet constellation, recently announced with T-Mobile. (Spangelo declined to provide further details about Swarm’s contributions to that offering, which is aiming to be in service on a limited basis before the end of next year.)

She said Swarm is able to do more and leverage greater resources as part of SpaceX that it would able to do on its own, though the company’s pitch–to be a low-cost, low-latency option for remote and distributed IoT deployments–has resonated with clients pursuing a number of use cases.

“With founding Swarm, our goal was really to solve for global affordable connectivity focusing on the IoT space,” Spangelo said. “We developed a small satellite that's about the size of a grilled cheese sandwich, and we had a plan to deploy about 150 of these into low Earth orbit by ride-sharing on various rockets, and provide this low cost connectivity solution at something like 10x or 20x lower cost than existing legacy solutions like Iridium network. Because our satellites were so small, we had really unique launch economics.”

That has proven a game-changer for organizations that could benefit from, but otherwise not be able to afford more expensive IoT offerings. One example is Dryad Networks, a company that has deployed a distributed network of sensors over large areas of wilderness to detect wildfires. Swarm has achieved satellite-to-ground latency of under one hour, which can let fire responders know about fire locations several hours sooner than they otherwise might be notified.

Another example is Rainforest Connection, which uses Swarm’s service to monitor rainforests in the interest of detecting illegal logging and other deforestation activities. Swarm also has provided asset tracking for heavy equipment in ground transport, maritime and oil and gas industries, among others. It even has tracked cows.

After a year in the SpaceX family, Swarm remains intent on continuing to improve on the business case for affordable satellite IoT connectivity that it launched with. “We will continue between Swarm and SpaceX to offer improvements and connectivity solutions, both for the IoT space for Starlink’s solutions with the direct-to-cell stuff,” she said. “And what I mean by improvement is generally reducing latency, increasing data rates, and lowering prices and making us more accessible, meaning satellites connecting to more countries.”