Swarm Technologies
Swarm Technologies, Inc. is a company building a low Earth orbit satellite constellation for communications with Internet of things (IoT) devices using a store and forward design. Social Capital partners Jay Zaveri and Arjun Sethi incubated and seed funded Swarm, Craft Ventures was an early investor. On 16 July 2021 Swarm entered into an agreement to become a wholly owned subsidiary of SpaceX.
| Company type | Subsidiary |
|---|---|
| Industry | Telecommunications |
| Founded | 2016 |
| Founders | Sara Spangelo (CEO) Ben Longmier |
| Headquarters | Palo Alto, California, U.S. |
Number of employees | 30 (2021) |
| Parent | SpaceX |
| Website | www |
In-Q-Tel, the venture capital arm of the CIA, lists Swarm Technologies as one of their startups.
They have a Federal Communications Commission (FCC) licence for low bandwidth communications satellites in low Earth orbit.
In 2018 Swarm became the first U.S. company found to have deployed satellites without regulatory approval after an FCC investigation into the startup's launch of its first four picosatellites on an Indian PSLV rocket in January that year.
By December 2020 Swarm had launched 9 test satellites and 36 of a planned 150 low Earth orbit satellites to provide communication with IOT devices.
In February 2021 Swarm announced that its commercial services were now live using 72 commercial satellites providing its global low cost data service to customers.
The Swarm Tile is its dedicated two-way satellite data modem designed to be low energy and embedded on the PCB of third-party products. Other products include a data plan and a development kit.