Here’s what Swarm has been up to in the 10 months since being acquired by SpaceX – TechCrunch

Sara Spangelo is the senior director of Satellite Engineering at SpaceX, and she is ready to talk about what she has been up to since the acquisition of Swarm. I was curious to know what it was like for Spangelo and for Swarm. She says it has been 10 months.

The ability to actually launch its satellites, which themselves are tiny, was one of the biggest blockers in terms of speed of deployment and growth. Spangelo said that unlocked launch availability has been one of the biggest benefits of operating under the umbrella.

She told me that access to a free launch is exciting. Since we last spoke, we have launched at least three or four times, and we now have over 160 satellites in low-Earth-orbit.

The company's low-bandwidth, hyper efficient services can now be used by a wide range of customers, thanks to the experimental payloads that improved the company's overall latency.

That is a pretty important threshold, if you are doing any sort of monitoring, whether it is floods, water, forest fire detection, agriculture applications, Logistics applications, that is like a pretty important threshold in that community A lot of exciting new use cases and customers have been unlocked by being low.

It is easy for the company to just pop them on when they are on a launch for other customers. The benefits of being the smallest operational satellites in space mean that you stand a better chance of fitting within existing mission parameters than most of the time.

Spangelo says that access to regular orbital delivery service is incredibly valuable to a technology like Swarm, but that it is also unlocked a host of other efficiency that help the previously small startup leap ahead in terms of its maturation and infrastructure.

She said that they had access to more support systems. Legal, accounting, HR, recruiting, logistics, supply chain and production are some of the topics covered. A lot of our production rate has been accelerated by that. We will probably sell more devices this year than we did last year.

It's a two-way street and Spangelo says that SpaceX is already benefiting.

She did not give any details on what those programs might look like in the future. She agreed that there could be synergies between Starlink's consumer internet service and Swarm's connected device offerings.

She said that they are having product discussions across the chasm that is Starlink broadband, to the swarm internet of things. There are a lot of gaps between things that you are suggesting. Some of the same enterprise customers have begun to engage with us. It's possible that big agriculture companies, oil and gas companies, or maritime companies have need for satellite internet. We have been able to benefit from the fact that some people are interested in Starlink and others are not.

With new use cases and new sales relationships, as well as plenty of demand on both sides, Spangelo says both Starlink and Swarm are still growing their teams.

She said that many people don't know that Starlink is a networking company. The company we think of as a hardware rocket company is SpaceX. The back end of the core networks and laser mesh networks are very complex. We have over 200 software engineers on Starlink. We are looking for great talent there.

She mentioned a number of new use cases that have come online since we last spoke, including wildfire detection. You can change the approach to detection and prevention of wildfires, which can spread for hours or even days without people knowing, if you have a max of under one hour of latency. Dryad Networks is a company that is working with Swarm.

The Rainforest Connection uses the Swarm network to connect their acoustic sensors.

She said that the acoustic sensor on the phone was similar to the one on the chainsaw. That one is cool to me because it is so easy to find these things.

Spangelo says that they are looking to build more software products for enterprise customers and that they are happy with where the satellite hardware and design is currently. Some of the larger enterprise use cases don't require the sophisticated integration of their current modem design, she said, something more "on brand with" Musk's "out".

The location of the facility in Mountain View makes it easy to collaborate a short distance from the office. The launch pads for the Falcon 9 are a little further away, but you can still get a great ride.