Swarm Technologies is the IoT layer that SpaceX bought in 2021 and then quietly folded under its umbrella. Before the acquisition it was an independent startup founded in 2016, building toaster-sized satellites for low-data-rate machine-to-machine communications. The constellation is small, roughly 150 satellites in orbit, and designed for very low bandwidth, low power use cases: agriculture sensors, logistics trackers, pipeline monitoring.

The selling point is price. Swarm’s hardware is cheap, the data plans are cheaper, and the entire service is meant to undercut Iridium and Orbcomm in markets where customers just want a trickle of telemetry. Devices can send small packets for a few dollars a month, which makes it accessible to industries that cannot justify traditional satcom.

After SpaceX acquired it, Swarm stopped being a standalone competitor and became a feature. The company now benefits from SpaceX’s regulatory and launch muscle, which gives it global licensing and a near-zero launch cost. That allows SpaceX to position Swarm as a complementary service to Starlink: high-throughput broadband for ships and planes, ultra-low-power IoT for remote sensors.

The risks are straightforward. The IoT satellite market is crowded with small LEO operators, many of which are undercapitalized. Margins are thin, churn is high, and terrestrial LPWAN technologies keep eating into potential growth. Swarm’s advantage is that it no longer has to survive on its own balance sheet. It is effectively subsidized by SpaceX, which can keep it running as long as it sees strategic value.

The real story is that Swarm is no longer a company to watch in isolation. It is part of SpaceX’s strategy to offer a complete spectrum of satellite services, from gigabit broadband to kilobit IoT. That makes it more durable than most of its peers, but also less visible. Swarm on its own is small. Swarm inside SpaceX is an insurance policy that keeps competitors like Iridium or Astrocast from owning the low-data-rate niche.