Revolutionizing Global Connectivity: Tarun Gupta on Skylo’s Satellite Innovation, IoT Impact, and Strategic Collaborations

Ever wondered how IoT devices can stay connected globally without breaking the bank? Get ready to uncover the secrets in our discussion with Tarun Gupta, co-founder and Chief Product Officer at Skylo. Discover how Skylo is turning the connectivity world on its head by using existing satellite infrastructure instead of launching new satellites. Tarun shares his vision of treating satellites as enormous reflectors to extend cellular networks, providing seamless global connectivity for IoT devices, consumer smartphones, and the automotive industry. With strategic collaborations with satellite giants like Viasat, EchoStar, and TerraStar, Skylo is poised to transform how we think about staying connected.

The impact of Skylo’s technology reaches far beyond urban centers—changing lives in rural areas through innovative applications in farming, fishing, and emergency communication. Imagine fishermen in the Indian Ocean sending SOS signals or farmers in India renting tractors by the acre; these are just some of the incredible stories we explore. Tarun also delves into narrowband satellite connectivity, covering vital services like voice, SMS, and even streaming. Gain insight into Skylo’s unique market strategy, their organizational footprint spanning Mountain View, Espoo, and Bangalore, and exciting future announcements. This episode is your gateway to understanding the massive potential and groundbreaking innovations in IoT connectivity that echo the early days of the Internet and the app store.

More at https://linktr.ee/EvanKirstel

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:02

Hey everyone, Happy Friday. Such an intriguing topic and guest today, revolutionizing IoT connectivity globally via satellite Tarun. How are you Excellent, Evan. How are you? I'm doing great, Thank you. And this next conversation is like science fiction realized. So I'm so excited to chat today and I have so many questions about Skylo, but before that, maybe introduce yourself a little bit about the mission and vision and your big idea.

Speaker 2: 0:32

I know I appreciate it. First of all, thanks for having me on the show, really excited about it. Thanks for meeting everyone here. So my name is Tarun Gupta, I'm one of the co-founders and I'm chief product officer here at Skylo. Our mission is to basically provide connectivity to everyone on the planet in a cost-effective manner, so you really never want to lose connectivity wherever you go, and we're offering that through a standardized approach, through satellites, which complements cellular networks, and that can be for IoT devices, consumer smartphones, as well as automotive. We've been doing this for a handful of years and we're pretty excited about it, and we're really, really excited around bringing connectivity to everyone in an affordable manner.

Speaker 1: 1:17

Wow, your ambitions aren't too grand, are they? I mean, this is a pretty big idea. What was the original inspiration? Tell us about the idea, and through to today, where are we?

Speaker 2: 1:28

Yeah, so we're four co-founders. Three of the co-founders actually came from the Space Systems Labs at Stanford University and kind of what happened was they recognized and we realized that there was a lot of work happening in the cellular industry but not a lot of innovation in the satellite industry. And what we realized was, hey, how can you take advantage of the work that's really driven up bandwidth and driven down costs on the cellular side and bring that to a bespoke sort of custom satellite industry and really take advantage of that? So how can we stand on the shoulders of giants here and really bring affordable connectivity globally? And so we did a lot of work prior to 3GPP, prior to the industry, to figure out what's the right waveform, how do we pull it together, what's the right modulation, what's the right device size, kind of all these things.

Speaker 2: 2:16

And we recognized that, along with the industry, frankly, that there was a way to bring from your existing device connectivity, kind of wherever you go. And that was the genesis. And so from there we were like you know what? This is something that we believe someone will pay for, whether that's enterprises, whether that's people, whether that's, you know, farmers. And so we said, hey, how can this pull together and we realized this was a pretty revolutionary novel idea. And when 3GPP ratified it you know, a couple of years ago now we realized we were onto something and really doubled down and began to hit the gas pedal.

Speaker 1: 2:52

Fantastic and this is not your father's satellite or network system. Really, a lot of the innovation is in the networking, the communications, a lot of new ways of doing communications between satellites. Explain all that behind the scenes how the you know the innovation you're bringing versus traditional. You know satellite networking and IP. That's been around for a long time.

Speaker 2: 3:16

And then the interesting part is it is your father's satellite.

Speaker 2: 3:19

That's the thing that's most exciting to me is like this is these are using satellites that are already existing in space. People are like are like oh, in order for this to work, you need a new satellite and raise billions of dollars and wait tens and years to make this work and, you know, be part of like spacex and starlink, where you need to kind of launch satellites, have them blow up and do whatever. It's not that. So what we realized was how can we make this the fastest time to market and really the easiest lift and the lowest friction possible? And so we said let's take advantage of existing infrastructure that's out in space. So we went out and partnered with the largest satellite operators on the planet. So Biosat is a tremendous partner of ours. We work with Echo Star and Terra Star and other folks that are there today, and by doing this we're able to take advantage of existing assets.

Speaker 2: 4:06

We did technology on the ground side. So basically we treat the satellites like, frankly, a 70,000 kilometer wireless wire, a big reflector in space, and we just said, look, instead of having your cell site transmit two miles, let's have your cell site transmit 70,000 kilometers, basically. And so we did a bunch of work with Doppler and timing and engineering and chipsets and all those things to say, hey, how do you take advantage of that longer latency? Build our own base station, put it in the satellite operator ground station and for you as the operator, you kind of or you as the user, you kind of don't know if you're on satellite or cellular, right? So, like today, today people don't realize if they're on Wi-Fi or cellular. It kind of just works. We're the same way and our goal is to make sure it's completely seamless, to make sure that you don't think about am I on satellite, I'm on cellular, I'm on Wi-Fi and do whatever. So we're bringing at least to the cell phone a fifth mode of communication, of wireless connectivity that we think is pretty important.

Speaker 1: 5:10

Pretty important, to say the least, and talk about some of the partnerships you developed and the support you have from some major players like gosh, softbank, boeing, bsnl, others, and how they influenced your direction and your growth and other aspects of the plan.

Speaker 2: 5:26

We've been very fortunate to assemble a tremendous community here and I think you know there's a saying that it takes a village and it honestly absolutely takes a village, and so we spent a lot of time in the first couple of years of the business figuring out who the right players in the ecosystem are. And you know, first and foremost, our satellite partnerships are huge and they really allow us to have the scale and the scope of where we want to reach globally, into every sort of every backyard, every corner, every national park, every, you know, every place that we're alive today. We also recognize that it's more than just the satellite operators. So we have now worked with chipset manufacturers, the likes of Qualcomm and Sony and MediaTek and Samsung and others. So we're in now 90, our technology is in 90 percent of the IoT chipset markets. We then took that and put our technology with the module manufacturers. So we did module work with, you know, with Murata and Tellit and Quechtel and Semtech and others, and so now we're in 50, 60 percent of all the modules that are out in the marketplace today.

Speaker 2: 6:32

Then we said, hey, how do we get the test houses? So we did work with Enritsu and Keysight and Rodin Schwartz from the test houses. They're the test equipment manufacturers. And then we did test houses with, you know, sgs and other folks for that. And then we said, well, we need sim partners. So we signed up Keegan as a sim partner as example.

Speaker 2: 6:49

So we brought the entire ecosystem together in terms of like RAN and or, sorry, not RAN, but core and billing and information, just all these things that the cellular industry has spent 40 years building and optimizing and training and all those things. And so we've built, we've brought that entire ecosystem together to help make sure this is not just a seamless end-to-end network, but a seamless end-to-end network. That is, frankly, the same block diagram as the cellular operators today. So we're just different scale.

Speaker 2: 7:23

But if you go to the cellular operator and say, hey, do you have a VSS? The answer is yes for them, yes for us, you have an OSS. Yes for them, yes for us, you have SIM partners. Yes, yes. And so everything that we do is exactly the same that they do in terms of offering the service and offering the RAN, offering the core, offering connectivity, offering SLAs, all those things they do. And so that enabled us to get some tremendous, tremendous financial backers. So you know, softbank is a tremendous backer of ours. We recently raised a whole set of monies from likes of BMW as well as Samsung, and that complement our existing partners at just DCM here, as well as Innovation Endeavors and others, so really have done some remarkable jobs of bringing the entire ecosystem together, whether it's partners or investors or customers and things like that. Couldn't be more proud, amazing work.

Speaker 1: 8:16

Congratulations on all that. And you talk a lot about the impact on rural areas so important and economic development, not just here in the US, really, but globally. Talk about some examples of implementations. I see here you're talking about farming and fishing and obviously agriculture of all sorts. I would love some stories around those areas, you know.

Speaker 2: 8:40

Evan. It's really remarkable to me to see this. So I've been in connectivity for probably way too long now, I would say, and so it's been a lot of fun. I'll give you a couple of stories.

Speaker 2: 8:51

When we first started this and really had the hypothesis could a cellular device connect to satellite, we did some trials out in India and the trials in India, you know, allowed us to connect to fishermen that were out in the middle of the Indian Ocean who, frankly, spend, you know, 20 days a month or so in the ocean, away from their families, away from sort of everyone, just out on a five meter boat, you know, catching fish as not just livelihood but, you know, feeding the country and the globe.

Speaker 2: 9:23

And what we found were a couple of things that came out so standard location, to make sure you know you're in Indian waters, domestic waters versus international waters. Standard location, you know, things to figure out, hey, where the fish are. The thing that was shocking to me and us, frankly, was the use cases people created. So, for example, they were like, hey, we're out in the middle of the ocean, we just caught some, you know, salmon, let's say, or tuna. What they found was because we, we enabled two way messaging. They were able to message back to shore and say, hey, I've caught whatever 10 pound or a ton of tuna. Should I come back in and sell it now, or should I keep fishing so they're?

Speaker 2: 10:05

able to get live market rates in terms of what fish we're selling for and be able to optimize what they were doing. To understand, hey, you know, this is we should do this now to make the best, you know, to make the have the freshest fish at the right catch to make the most amount of money. That was pretty interesting. We've saved dozens of lives when these you know, the motors on these boats break down or when there were fires on boats and we've you know they were able to reach out for an SOS. So I think you know fish catch reporting, we've came up where people were doing on these things. So I think for us, just having that pipe opened up so many more opportunities and options that we had thought about, didn't think about and in you know, we were working on things. Like you know, in in India, for example again, I'll give you another story in India, farmers rent tractors by the hour. To understand, you know, hey, they weren't. They weren't able to afford a tractor of their own, so they rented tractors by the hour. Oh, wow, using our tech, they said let's not rent by the hour, let's rent by the acre. So they basically said, hey, those of you that have tractors, you come in and we'll pay whatever some rate per acre, and so that way if you're efficient, you make the more money, and if you're not efficient then I don't lose a lot of money here. So it's really getting that fixed price bidding to do that farming work for them.

Speaker 2: 11:29

In the US we've had stories where hikers were out in the middle of the in Colorado and they were out of cell coverage and by using our technology and some of our partners' devices, they were able to connect and save their lives. When they fell down, they had altitude sickness actually, so they couldn't hike back 10 miles down. They had altitude sickness actually, so they couldn't hike back 10 miles down. They called for the SOS Helicopter, came out, rescued them and now both people are safe and recovering well and we're excited about saving lives. I mean. So I think, like I really think this is like the early days of the Internet, right? So the early days of the Internet and the early days of the app store, like you can, the things you can do with this is just simply amazing and it's really limited by people's imagination because you know, we're just happy to enable it. Frankly, Fantastic.

Speaker 1: 12:17

Well, what a wonderful story there. And beyond people to people, you know, the machine to machine communication opportunity must be huge with data collection from sensors. And what sort of scenarios do you foresee for that?

Speaker 2: 12:34

Yeah, I mean, you know, because this is really an extension of cellular. It's amazing to me Cellular is pretty much everywhere people are. But with the you know the rapid cost of declining silicon, the rapid cost of compute and the rapid you know rise in AI, we're finding that people are doing some amazing things with this technology. Like, we just are working with a operator now who is providing LPG tank monitoring out in the middle of the outback, so you know. So they're like, hey, why should we send a person out to check the status of the tank? We can kind of just measure where the status of the fuel or is fuel is. We are working with again there's a running joke on on this type of work around measuring cows. But I talked to a farmer and a farming consortium a couple of months ago. They were like, hey, we want this to measure our cows and where they are and all those things. I was like, okay, standard stuff.

Speaker 2: 13:30

Two things came out from this that I hadn't appreciated. One is and this is a new word I learned but they can tell through this technology and through the sensors that are very, very low cost dollars, they can tell if the cow is in estrus, which is a term to help them understand, kind of where the health of the cow. But the second thing that I found was the most exciting was the farmer was like hey, you know, with this technology now not just can I use it to tell where the cow is, but I'm using this to determine. I don't need to now send a yard hand to go out and validate or measure the fence. I can just use a digital fence and draw the fence from my iPad while I'm watching TV in my living room, as opposed to sending somebody out and driving the hundreds or thousands of miles of fencing that border their farm today. Right, so? So by saving that capex, saving that that operational cost, you're able to be much more efficient, make better decisions and really just embrace connectivity as part of their daily lifestyle now.

Speaker 1: 14:32

Fantastic. Well, I started my career in in Japan using pagers on their cows, little vibrating machines to call them in for the evening when it was time to come in from the field, and they would learn to come in after getting a page. So look how far we've come, 30-plus years later, with more advanced connectivity. Speaking of which, I mean talk about the technology where you are today. What's state of the art? But what's next in terms of the next year or two, five, that you're thinking about in terms of these incredible satellite networks that are being built?

Speaker 2: 15:16

Yeah. So the good news is again by us, by Skylo being working as a technology aggregator here, we're able to work with many different constellations and we're able to evolve as rapidly as the industry involves. So what we're working on today is narrowband NTN, so narrowband non-terrestrial network connectivity, which is really short message, high value services. So, again, location, temperature, again to your point, paging the cow to come home, kind of all those things that are high value. And as we move forward, I think about it in two ways. One is what will we do on the existing satellites and one is what will we do on new satellites. So existing satellites will be able to do things in the next 12 months in terms of, like a very narrow bandwidth streaming service.

Speaker 2: 16:01

So think about voice, whether voice is like a push to talk and over the top or a native application. I think about SMS that we've already launched and we're rolling that out. Sos we've talked about, you know. I think about things like, again, because it's a narrow band streaming service things like Spotify, things like all trails, things like hey, I can. I'm working with a customer now who is doing payments over satellite. We're working with AI chatbots as an example. So I think there's a lot of things. People like, oh, narrowband, you can't do a lot. There's so many things you can do. It's incredible. And then I think, as we continue to build that out again, I think about voice and data streaming services.

Speaker 2: 16:41

I don't think we'll get to a Netflix or a YouTube type of scenario in the next couple of years, but then again, I don't know if that's a use case that we're trying to solve, for I think, as the next gen Leo, the next gen constellations come out, what we'll see is probably better pictures.

Speaker 2: 16:58

As an example, mms as an example. I think about this, as you know, mms as an example. I think about this as if you know, for those like I remember my first pager and I remember how fun it was. But I think, like the industry has already done this, the good news is they went from that 1G to 5G evolution. We're going to do exactly the same thing. Like it won't be, like you'll see a couple of different things, like multicasts come out, or, you know, emergency alerts come out, or things where you notify everyone in a geographic area about, hey, a pending disaster or Amber Alert type of thing. But you know, I don't. But I think our trajectory will follow the cellular trajectory, just be lagging by you know by a little bit yeah, great, great insight.

Speaker 1: 17:43

By a little bit, yeah, great insight. And suppose I'm a business or an operator looking to transform operations in some fashion. How do they engage with you to leverage these services? What's your go-to-market? Is it direct? Do you work with kind of partners or channels? How does that work?

Speaker 2: 18:03

Yeah. So the good news also again here is, what we found is and one of our insights was that people that come to Skylo already have connectivity. So that farmer or that fisher or that automobile company or whatever, or that consumer, they have a relationship. They have a relationship with their mobile operator already. And so our goal is not to supplant, our goal is to we're a complementary network and so we're saying hey, operator, we're just like. We're just like an international data plan for you.

Speaker 2: 18:36

So we are an add on to their service at which they can charge however they like to charge. They can include it, they can bundle it, they can charge for it, they can offer packs, they can do whatever they want to charge, they can include it, they can bundle it, they can charge for it, they can offer packs, they can do whatever they want to do. And so our customers are the mobile network operators, full stop. So we're a wholesale operator to the MNOs. The MNOs then package that service or that NTN service plus their TN service to their enterprises, to their consumers, to their automobile OEMs, whatever right. So that way for the consumer, it's a one-stop shop, not having to pay a separate bill, a separate relationship, a separate agreement and for the operators, they're getting additional value without having to invest a single dollar of CapEx or with us a single Hertz of Spectrum.

Speaker 1: 19:21

A fantastic proposition and talk a little bit about the team as chief product officer, how you play within the organization and you know where are you guys and how are you kind of organized, give us a peek behind the curtain.

Speaker 2: 19:40

We're a growing company, so let me know if you have people that are looking for jobs. No, so we have three main offices today. First office is our global headquarters is in Mountain View, california. We have, and we're largely focused here on G&A plus some engineering support, plus technology development. We have a significant office in Finland and in Espoo, finland. That team is working on our RAN, our cloud and our core networks. And then we have a significant office in Bangalore, india, and that office does a lot of our engineering work plus BSS, plus OSS.

Speaker 2: 20:13

We are, you know, we're about 60 or so people today. We are a full stop network. So when we think about again a mobile network operator, we have the same you know, engineering, design and optimization. We have the same RAN and core teams. We have the same like certification teams. We have product, product management, sales, customer support, you know, legal functions, kind of all those things that make a company work. And so the you know we are excited, we're growing pretty big. We have, you know we'll probably have like, because we're a wholesale operator. We're not going to have thousands of customers or direct sort of our relationships, so we'll be the Intel inside for all the mobile operators for their NTN services.

Speaker 1: 20:59

Well, that's a nice position to be in. So what's next? Over the next few weeks, as we enter the summer season, events and conferences slow down a little bit. What's on your radar? Any travel or meetings coming?

Speaker 2: 21:12

up, I think you know. So the good news is, you'll probably see some good announcements come out from us in the next quarter or so. We have some really big announcements we're excited about, and those announcements will be across mobile operators as well as as devices, as well as some of them with our partners. So, you know, we continue to have announcements with our partners as we expand our you know chipset partners, as well as our module partners, as well as certification kind of all the things that happened today.

Speaker 2: 21:39

And so I think a lot of this is around driving awareness with the ecosystem to make sure this exists, because I still talk to dozens of people, you know, every month and they're like we didn't know this technology existed. And so, you know, as a specifically, I've been like, as an example, we've connected devices the size of an apple air tag directly to satellite and people are like, oh, I can't believe, it doesn't work. And so I think we have to do a better job of just making sure the industry is aware that, hey, this technology exists today, it's already certified, it can be in your existing devices and all it does is need to follow these three, four steps and you're ready to go. So I think what you'll see from us over the next quarter and two is just scaling and really really beating the drum that, hey, ntn is out there, you can take advantage of it. You don't have to worry about where you are anymore, because if you can see the sky, you'll have connectivity.

Speaker 1: 22:30

Wow, that's a mic drop moment and our friends at Apple with iOS 18 will be doing some good work to raise the global visibility of satellite communications as well. That should be a pretty much game changer for awareness. But thanks so much for joining and just sharing the insights and congratulations on all the success. Long words and upwards.

Speaker 2: 22:52

Evan, I appreciate it. Thanks for having me. It's been a lot of fun and happy to help as much as I can.

Speaker 1: 22:56

Thanks so much. Thanks everyone for watching and you know, follow Skylo on social. They put out some great content. Have some really amazing insights there to share as well. Thanks everyone, thank you.