Swarm Technologies is the satellite data management startup purchased by SpaceX

The operation will bring the know-how of Swarm Technologies under the hat of the company of Elon Musk, which with the Starlink project intends to bring internet via satellite to all remote areas of the planet

The founder of Tesla ( photo: Getty Images News) SpaceX has acquired Swarm Technologies, a startup specializing in satellite data management, in a rather unusual operation given that Elon Musk's company tends to fully develop its technological capabilities, also in relation to the Starlink project for the internet via satellite. This is what emerges from a document submitted to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) by Swarm itself: founded in 2016 by Sara Spangelo and Benjamin Longmier, former Google and Apple engineers, it will become a "wholly owned subsidiary of SpaceX", based on to an agreement signed in July.

Swarm has already sent 120 of the 150 SpaceBee aircraft into orbit, "the smallest commercially operational satellites in space". The dimensions, in fact, are 11 by 11, by 2.8 centimeters, that is a little less than a notebook, and are able to communicate with a smart "tile" placed on the ground or implemented in the hardware of a device, in order to establish a connected network in the Internet of Things. Each of these "Swarm Tiles" sells for $ 119 to $ 499, with a subscription fee of $ 5 a month to use the network. On the occasion of a fundraiser in 2019, the company was valued at 85 million dollars.



Applications can vary from agriculture to energy, from the maritime sphere to the environment. Under the transaction, SpaceX will have access to Swarm's intellectual property, but it is not yet clear how it will use this technology. As part of the Starlink project, it has launched 1,700 of the 4,409 programmed satellites and has already obtained the participation of about 100,000 "beta" users, demonstrating a much more advanced development of OneWeb (supported by the United Kingdom), of the Canadian Telesat and of the Kuiper project of Amazon, reviving the space rivalry with Jeff Bezos (both have decided to invest 10 billion dollars in satellites). Starlink intends to bring the internet to all areas of the globe, with connection speeds comparable to that of 5G, and the first subscriptions were sold for $ 99 each, redeemable.

SpaceX has achieved a valuation of $ 74 billion (+ 60%) after a round of financing of 850 million last February and believes that the Starlink project will be able to collect 30 billion in revenues per year, more than 10 times the business related to space flights. As reported by Cnbc at the time, the prospect indicated by Musk, once it is possible to predict the flow of receipts, is a spin-off and a listing on the Stock Exchange of Starlink.


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Topics

Elon Musk SpaceX satellites Startup space globalData.fldTopic = "Elon Musk, Satellites, SpaceX, Space, startup "

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