Swarm: September 2, 2018 Snippets
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This week’s theme: sharing Swarm’s story and enormous opportunity ahead. Plus Sempre Health raises their Series A.
Every once in a while, a special team meets a hard problem at the right time. Swarm Technologies, led by founders Sara Spangelo and Ben Longmier, is one of those teams. For over a year we’ve been looking forward to sharing Swarm’s story, and we’re beyond excited to finally be able to do so. So buckle up, because this is a team, opportunity, and launch story that you don’t hear about every day.
Satellite telecommunications has been something we’ve worked on collectively as an industry and as a country for quite some time. Last week in Snippets we heard about the story of GPS, and the technical barriers associated with synchronizing signals between earth and space; you may also have read about earlier satellite communication networks like Iridium, or modern-day efforts like OneWeb and SpaceX to digitally connect the entire planet. The demand for satellite connectivity is poised to explode: not only for humans around the world seeking connectivity on mobile devices in underserved areas, but also for internet-connected objects of all kinds: think shipping containers, water wells, agricultural sensors, and all kinds of applications at the IoT frontier. Connectivity is should not just be for some privileged percentage of the world; it must be for everyone, everywhere. To pull that off, we’re going to need satellites. And they’ll need to be very cheap.
One of the biggest challenges around bringing down the cost of satellite connectivity is the economics of launching an object that weighs hundreds or thousands of pounds into low earth orbit. Shrinking satellites into ever-smaller form-factors — you may have heard about “CubeSats” in this effort — is one way we’ve tried to bring down launch costs and connectivity costs. But at some point, we run into a critical obstacle: beyond a certain size threshold, satellites become too small to stabilize and course-correct themselves as they fly in orbit, and also too small to be effectively tracked by government monitoring agencies like NORAD’s Space Surveillance Network. From the outside, it looked like the industry had reached a global minimum for how small we could build and fly satellites in space; as a result, we’ve projected our rockets, payloads, and anticipated connectivity costs with that minimum in mind. But that was before Swarm.
Sara and Ben, both space industry and Silicon Valley veterans (Sara spent time at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab and then at Google, and Ben co-founded multiple aerospace companies, one acquired by Apple), have put together a team at Swarm that completely upends the conventional thinking about what, where, and how inexpensive a satellite can be. Their tiny satellites, which they call SpaceBEES and orbit the earth right now, are about the size of a grilled cheese sandwich: by far the smallest functional satellites ever produced. They are also are self-stabilizing and therefore require no heavy or expensive propulsion equipment, and can be tracked through state-of-the-art retro reflector technology jointly developed with the US Navy. (You can track them here!) They’ve built and tested them astonishingly quickly: as Sara explains, “In less than a year after closing our Seed funding round, our team invented a new satellite stabilization scheme and built and launched four operational satellites into Low Earth Orbit. Our satellite design doesn’t require the large, heavy, and power-hungry components common in conventional satellites. The small size and low mass of our satellites also makes them inexpensive to launch, providing unique economics for the deployment of our network. Swarm’s future constellation of 100 satellites will solve the problem of low-cost connectivity at a global scale far faster than any other provider, and at a fraction of the price.”
Swarm’s satellite network won’t be competing with Verizon’s cell towers to stream wireless coverage to your phone — at least, not quite yet. Their first mission is to bring connectivity at very low cost to places it has never reached before, starting with small amounts of data and working their way up. Think tiny packets of data, almost like tweets, that people or connected devices need to send on a regular basis to communicate their status or convey crucial information, like the real-time temperature inside a shipping container as it crosses the ocean. As Sara tells Ashlee Vance (who you may know from his eponymous book on Elon Musk), writing for Bloomberg: “We’re sort of making a 1996 version of the Internet. But it will be everywhere, and anyone on the planet can afford it.” Initial costs will run at around one penny per quarter-kilobyte message, made possibly Swarm’s uniquely cheap launch economics: with satellites that small, they can sneak into the nooks and crannies of rockets that otherwise would not be useable for bringing cargo into orbit. It’s also created a unique regulatory challenge, and after some fits and starts over the last year, Swarm has recently received Special Temporary Authority licensing from the FCC to conduct GPS testing with their satellites that are already in orbit.
In order to connect to Swarm’s network, customers on the ground will soon be able to purchase ground connectivity stations, called “Tiles”, that can be attached to any kind of internet-connected device and which syncs continuously with Swarm’s network. Larger bay stations, which can sync large numbers of devices (like a fleet of sensors across a farm, or shipping containers on a vessel) are on the way soon. Although Swarm can’t yet say who their early customers are, they have a number of incredible opportunities lined up with Fortune 100 companies around the globe, working on projects like ground transportation, interpersonal communication, and maritime connectivity. One partnership they have announced publicly is with SweetSense, which builds and deploys connected water pumps in East Africa to make sure local citizens have uninterrupted, safe access to clean drinking water 24/7.
The ambition, scope, and promise of Swarm and their mission is breathtaking, and we’re thrilled and proud to be investors. If you’re excited about the future of space, connectivity, and democratization of internet accessibility, Swarm is hiring: you can find open job positions here. If you’d like to keep up with what they’re up to, you can also subscribe to their newsletter.
Trips to Costco tend to be strange, delightful experiences. They’re confusing, maybe, given the strangely haphazard (but also meticulously designed) layouts that place seemingly unrelated items in rows with one another. But they’re also interesting for another reason: how cheap they’re able to sell not only their own Kirkland Signature products (which tend to be pretty high-quality) but also genuine, branded products from premium lines. One of their “home-grown” products that’s developed a cult following over the last couple years is their line of single-malt scotches, which many whiskey connoisseurs swear is better than a good number of the expensive Scottish brands. How do they pull it off? Aaron Goldfarb investigates:
You’ll also enjoy this excellent profile of C.C. Myers, Californian construction guru, whose reputation for completing any civil construction job early and under budget will make you wonder just what, exactly, everyone else is doing.
Elsewhere in the world:
Inside the haywire world of Beirut’s electricity brokers | Kenneth R Rosen, Backchannel
Science in Iran languishes after Trump re-imposes sanctions | Richard Stone, Science
Kolmanskop: the spectacular ghost town of Namib desert
California takes more steps on greenhouse gases:
As transportation continues to get unbundled, some looks back at Uber’s marketplace dynamics:
Why “Uber for X” startups failed: the supply side is king | Andrew Chen
Uber’s bundles | Ben Thompson, Stratechery
The rule of law and its strange inevitabilities:
Is cryptocurrency legally money? It depends on your state | Justin Wales & Arnaldo Rego
Bureaucracy as active ingredient | Scott Alexander, Slate Star Codex
Other reading from around the Internet:
Alibaba puts the breaks on US cloud expansion | Kevin McLaughlin, The Information
The twenty-five year journey of Magic the Gathering | Neima Jahromi, The New Yorker
Flying blind into the Anthropocene | Venkatesh Rao, Ribbonfarm
How to plant a trillion trees | Rachel Cernansky, Nature
And finally, some undeniably great news to round out the week:
The long, monstrous reign of the Red Delicious apple is ending | Niraj Chokshi, NYT
In this week’s news and notes from the Social Capital family:
To start off, Sempre Health has raised $8 million in Series A financing, led by Rethink Impact and joined by Social Capital.
Medical adherence incentive platform Sempre Health raises $8M | Dave Muoio, MobiHealthNews
Founded in 2015 and having launched their incentive-based pricing platform last year, Sempre Health helps to solve an important but unrecognized problem with prescription medication: with no way to effectively track and incentivize patients to pick up and take their medication on schedule, the system has to collectively treat everybody with “suspicion”. Patients who are genuinely diligent about their meds could (and do!) pass on a lot of savings back into the healthcare system, but they have no way of recognizing or benefiting from that reliability. Sempre helps to solve that problem, by tying behavior to benefits in a way that helps get good results for all. Anurati Mathur, Sempre’s CEO, explains that “We aim to build a world where healthcare benefits are individualized and responsive. Everyone should be able to share in the savings they generate for the healthcare system. Our goal is to provide improved adherence, increased engagement and an easy and effective intervention, fundamentally changing medication affordability and access.”
Earlier this spring, Sempre made waves by announcing a partnership with diabetes and pharmaceutical giant Novo Nordisk, and their new round of funding will help accelerate their progress. Ashley Carroll from Social Capital notes,“We’re excited to continue to support Sempre in their mission to make essential medicine more affordable. It’s been amazing to watch this team evolve from two founders with a big idea to a fast-growing company with a product that’s already improving the lives of thousands of patients.”
And finally, BoxWorks took place this past week.
BoxWorks 2018: the power of intelligence and automation in digital business transformation
Along with the usual excellent yearly gathering of business & technology leaders, one important thing to watch this year was the continued rollout of Box’s Skills Kit. Originally announced last year, the Box Skills are simple, programmable functions that allow users to take any file in Box, process it with internal or external machine intelligence to understand its content and metadata, and then structure its output in order to automate all kinds of business tasks. For example, this might mean transcribing customer service calls, analyzing them for customer sentiment, and then automatically triggering follow-ups when appropriate: something that just a few years ago would have required a serious, custom-built machine learning effort, but is now no big deal. This year, as the Box Skills kit matures and emerges out of its early testing period, we got a preview for more upcoming AI tools that will be included, and also have a final general release date: December 2018. Furthermore, Automations — which standardize and accelerate that process even more — will be available shortly after in January 2019. Congratulations on a great BoxWorks to the team, as it’s become an annual tradition to anticipate!
Have a great long weekend,
Alex & the team from Social Capital
