Closing Bell - Manifest Space: Cell Phone to Satellites with Skylo CEO Parth Trivedi 4/11/25

Episode Date: April 11, 2025

As Amazon looks to launch its first Kuiper satellite mission, space infrastructure’s role in enhancing global connectivity is coming to fruition. Skylo, a company that links cell phones to communication satellites, is also making moves—recently collaborated with Charter and Comcast to provide satellite connectivity for emergency messaging services. CEO Parth Trivedi joins Morgan Brennan to discuss the expanding space-based communications market, competition with companies like Starlink and AST SpaceMobile, and the company’s outlook.

Earlier this week, Amazon attempted to launch its first official Kuiper satellites, as the tech giant looks to build out a space-based broadband service to rival SpaceX's. The mission was scrubbed due to weather, but it highlights how space infrastructure is propelling greater connectivity. Take Skylo. CEO and co-founder Parth Trivedi says the global direct-to-device service operator links cell phones to communication Satellites far away from Earth so users never lose their mobile connection What we built was it's called radio access network. It's part of Skylose IP

We have more than a hundred patents around the entire tech stack that we have built. You should really think about what we do around the entire tech stack that we have built, you should really think about what we do in the same way that you think about what a carrier does, your cell phone carrier does. So we have a global network operation center, we have a global core network, we interconnect with other networks, much like a roaming partner,

we have our own SIM range. So again, the same ingredients that you would find in any world-class network service operator business you would find in Skylo. Our differentiator in our approach is that it's software defined and therefore infinitely flexible and scalable as new technologies, new constellations get launched.

Skylo recently announced a collaboration with Charter and CNBC parent company Comcast to enable satellite connectivity for emergency messaging services. It will be available for mobile customers using certain smartphones. On this episode, Skylo's role in the growing space-based communications market, how it compares to competitors like Starlink and AST Space Mobile, and what comes next. I'm Morgan Brennan and this is Manifest Space. Joining me now, Parth Trivedi, Skylo co-founder and CEO. And Parth, it's great to have you on Manifest Space.

Welcome. Thank you so much, Morgan. Excited to be here. So let's just start at the beginning. What, Skylo co-founder and CEO, and Parth, it's great to have you on Manifest Space. Welcome. Thank you so much, Morgan. It's great to be here. So let's just start at the beginning. What is Skylo? So Skylo is a global direct-to-device service operator that connects cellular devices directly over satellite so that you never lose coverage. We essentially bounce your cellular signals off of

satellites that are very, very far away from Earth and down back to the ground, allowing you to essentially stay connected with your loved ones, with your business in a manner in which you're already familiar with, with the device that's already in your pocket or on your wrist. So what does that infrastructure look like? I mean, I think about Apple with its SOS services, but I also realize that's enabled by some of the hardware that's been built into the phone.

So what does Skylo do to be able to balance those connections? Absolutely. So just for context, when we started the company, we spun our team out of Stanford University. The thing that we were frustrated about was the fact that you needed to use separate proprietary chipsets, separate protocols to connect devices over satellite. And we said, hey, can't a standard cellular chipset and a standard cellular protocol do the job? What would it take? And really the answer was we needed to build a new software stack that essentially sits within existing satellite earth stations. We take advantage of existing satellites and potentially new ones as and when they are launched. So we really started from the ground up looking at what would it take for a standard cellular chip

to connect over satellite? What modifications if any need to be done entirely in software such that the conundrum that we face around, hey, I don't wanna carry $1,000 satellite phone in my pocket for those moments when I'm out of coverage. I want the same device that I already have to do that. And so what we built was, it's called Radio Access Network. It's part of Skylo's IP. We have more than a hundred patents around the entire tech stack that we have built, you should really think about what we do in the same way

that you think about what a carrier does, your cell phone carrier does. So we have a global network operation center, we have a global core network, we interconnect with other networks, much like a roaming partner, we have our own SIM range. So again, the same ingredients that you would find

in any world-class network service operator business you would find in Skylo. Our differentiator in our approach is that it's software-defined and therefore infinitely flexible and scalable as new technologies, new constellations get launched. How long ago did you start the company? We spun out in December of 2017.

And since then we've built probably the world's largest ecosystem of certified devices that can connect. And what's fascinating to me is the fact that you're adding more partners to this. And just recently Charter and Comcast, which is a parent company of CNBC, announcing that they're going to launch satellite connectivity for mobile devices through this collaboration with you. I guess just walk me through the partner ecosystem and what that means in terms of enabling more connectivity more quickly? Absolutely. So you've got to really study the different layers of the telecom stack,

which is really invisible to you as it should be as a consumer. We had to start with the modem. So there's a modem in your phone that is facilitating the connectivity to your cell network. And we started with partnerships with Samsung, with Qualcomm, with MediaTek, with Sony, that allowed us to work with them at the firmware level and ensure that their modem could now speak this new language called satellite. That included the introduction of certain bands that weren't previously present in those modems.

Then we went on to work with module makers. Then we went on to work with device makers. So one example of that is Google Pixel. And we have certified since several different types of smartphones on our network, several different types of IoT devices, wearables on the network. And what that means is your device, whether it's the modem,

whether it's the operating system, we're natively integrated with Android in the back end. So whether it's your operating system, whether it's the device, all of them now have context on this new mode of connectivity. It's really about adding a very predictable user experience. And if you think about it, the last mode of connectivity that was added to your phone was probably NFC, right? So it was cellular, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and NFC, and now you have satellite. So adding a new mode of connectivity to a phone

is a very, very heavy lift. A lot of that happens behind the scenes. But the way it really manifests itself is through our carrier partnerships, such as the one with Comcast, which allows a Comcast subscriber to get access to the service no differently than if they were roaming to another country.

Hmm. What are the space companies that you're partnering with on this? Because to me, one of the interesting things is that it seems like it's a lot of geostationary satellite players. Yeah, so if you look at the criteria that we had to down select on to enable the service,

you couldn't just select any satellite. You have to select certain spectrum, which is generally within the vicinity of cellular frequencies. And that's what essentially allows the same antennas that are in your phone to be able to see the satellite signal fundamentally and transmit and receive in those bands. So physically it had to be between the, so sandwiched between cellular frequencies.

So that's called mobile satellite spectrum, MSS. And so that kind of narrows down the universe of satellite partners that we could have worked with. And then within that, we had to also choose the right partners who had spectrum licenses in the countries in which our customers operated, so we could hit the ground running, ample capacity to scale, and also enough power on the satellite.

I mean, these are satellites that are 35,000 kilometers away, so they've got to have enough juice, enough power on them to be able to have your extremely tiny ear on the ground receive a signal from far away. And so that led us to half a dozen satellite operator partnerships, including companies like Miasat and EchoStar and Terastar, that allowed us to scale at an incredibly quick rate.

We are now live, Morgan, in 35 countries across five continents. And scaling already have millions of activated devices on the network. And what that means is that the consumers who have access to your service on their devices through their carriers are basically not experiencing dead zones where maybe traditionally they would have because their phones are being connected through the space infrastructure that you're enabling. Is that the way to think about it? That's exactly right.

I mean, our mantra was, Morgan, how do we eliminate changes in user behavior in accessing the service? So obviously the biggest one was, hey, you don't need a separate device. The device that you already have is the one. But again, if we take that argument further, can you receive the service the same way you buy connectivity today, which is through your carrier?

And that's why we set up our relationships and partnerships with the carriers. And you can see Yosemite in my background here. It's not necessary that you would only use the service. If you're in Yosemite, you might have a micro hole in coverage, like perhaps I do in the southern lip of Stanford's campus where I stay. And that's okay. That's an area where you previously couldn't send a text and now you can.

Is there a plan in the future to connect with more of these satellite carriers? I know we're talking about geostationary orbit and a very specific piece of spectrum, but we have seen this rise in low Earth orbit enabled connectivity, too, whether it's Starlink at SpaceX or some of the other players. You've also got AST Space Mobile, which is getting a lot of attention right now for what it's enabling with devices without having to have hardware plugged into them as well. Yeah, absolutely. So what you'll see is there's no silver bullet in telecom. There are many different approaches. We believe that our approach is extremely scalable

and predictable, which has resulted in the success we've seen in these different markets and partnerships. But there's no, again, there's no silver bullet to telecom. There are different approaches to solving the same problem. What we're excited about is the cost of building satellites has radically come down over the past decade. You will see new infrastructure get launched into space. The reason we took a software-defined approach to solving this problem is so that we could take advantage of new infrastructure

as and when that gets launched through our partners. And that inherently means this is going to be a hybrid network. As new satellites get launched, we can take advantage of it. We can pass that advantage down to our consumers who can switch dynamically between satellites. And that happens today, by the way, as well. When you're on Skylo's network, you are presented with a single homogeneous network where all of the heavy lifting of switching

between different types of satellites, different spectrum bands, it's all done by us. What's the business model? How does this work? Because I would imagine this is an extra service that's now being offered to consumers and businesses that need, you know, I think about IoT, for example, where the stakes are maybe even higher than consumers having a dropped call. So what does that business model look like?

How do you make money off of basically being this broker between the different pieces in the network? So that's a great question, Morgan. And we run essentially a B2B2C model. What that means is we don't want to prescribe in each market to the carrier, how they should present pricing and retail strategy to their end user. Looks a certain way in the United States.

It may look a certain different way if you were to scale the same solution in a different country. And so we do essentially a wholesale contract with our M&O customers, our carrier customers, who then have infinite flexibility in whether they want to make it part of the retail plan, postpaid, prepaid, whether they want to charge an incremental amount, whether they want to make it available to the highest end tier, whether they want to make a day pass, whether they want to make it an insurance-based model,

which you could imagine might be attractive in certain markets. So that flexibility and we're co-creating a new market segment together. That's the way we think about it is this is not a market segment where you already have established commercial rates and plans and consumers are well aware of what to expect. That's not the case at all. We're co-creating that for the first time. And we feel that that is best done by those players who are authentic to each geography. And that's the carrier.

In certain select cases, we have the flexibility to work directly with OEMs, because we ourselves are a carrier, which satellite only carrier. But if you were an OEM and you wanted to offer connectivity to your subscribers who are largely using satellite, or perhaps you wanted to offer a baseline service even before your customer selected

which carrier they want to work with, then Skylo in and of itself is a service provider that can work directly with OEMs. And we do have certain relationships like that. How do you see demand for this product growing? I did just sort of touched on it with the business or enterprise possibilities in addition to the consumer ones. I mean, I think about something like autonomous driving or even just, in general, connected machines.

I would imagine that having that continuous connectivity is going to matter more and more now. Absolutely. I mean, with the advent of autonomous ubiquitous connectivity, stable sticks, I would add that you're also seeing with the inflection of AI agent interaction that there is a distinct shift in how content is consumed on the internet. You know, speaking for myself, I use Perplexity and ChatGt.

It's really a text-based and an audio-based question-answer response session, as opposed to browsing high-bandwidth websites. So that means that we can allow our customers to take advantage of these types of interactions on a ubiquitous basis. We also demoed some of that at Mobile World Congress. You hit the nail on the head by talking about the enterprise

opportunity. We recently announced a partnership with Harman in the automotive segment, as an example, which means that if you're a car maker, you can now take advantage of satellite connectivity with the same TCU, with the same hardware that you're installing in your next lineup of cars. And so we're seeing an upswell in and we break it up into three categories. Essentially, automotive is one big category in and of itself.

The second one is IoT. We have a number of different commercial cattle trackers, spec trackers, asset trackers on the network. Maritime is going to be a huge opportunity for this, not the big boats, but the millions of smaller boats that so far have never had a chance to connect affordably and scalably. And then of course, there's consumer, which obviously takes up a lot of the oxygen in the room because we are all sort of using or being able to use that capability in our phones,

but that's how we segment the market. How do you see this broader market and this broader realm of connectivity evolving? And what does it mean for Skylo looking out years into the future? That's another great question, Morgan. And we see our job as not connecting devices over satellite and creating a distinct sort of mechanism to do that.

We want to integrate as fully as possible into the 5G, 6G ecosystem as possible. And what that means is how can we drive extreme accessibility for consumers and enterprises, people who are using cellular devices. If you look years into the future, my view is that you will have, my prediction is that you will have billions of devices that are able to access cellular satellite. Again, these will all be cellular devices. They will not be designed specifically for satellite communications at all. There will be no barriers or no friction in them being able to access satellite. Of course, there will be no barriers or no friction in them being able to access satellite. Of course, there will be mechanisms built in that guide the behavior of devices latching

on and off the network. But I think what you'll find is, do you remember when Wi-Fi came out, switching between Wi-Fi and cellular used to be a very manual task? I think we can all recollect those experiences that we had. And then there came an inflection point where I used to take a call from home. I used to step out of my home. And the call just continued on cellular very naturally without any breaks. And without me having to manually tell the phone, hey, now I want to switch from Wi-Fi

to cellular. By the way, that took a lot of heavy lifting from the industry. And expect that to happen again behind the scenes. That's what Skylo is going to do. And you're going to see that seamless nature of handoff happen between cellular and satellite down the road. Well, Parth Trivedi of Skylo, thank you so much for joining me. Appreciate the conversation. That does it for this episode of Manifest Space. Make sure you never miss a launch by following us wherever you get your podcasts and by watching

our coverage on Closing Bell Overtime. I'm Morgan Brennan.