Overview: GoTenna is a great example of a company that built legit tech, found its niche in the federal market, and fought to survive long enough to generate the kind of traction that will allow it to be a smash hit. CEO Ari Schuler joined us to share his candid takes on the company, the journey, and the market.
About GoTenna: GoTenna is a mesh networking solution that allows people to communicate in austere and communications-denied environments. The service allows users to build, own and trust their own networks.
The company supports over 350 agencies in mission-critical operations around the world today.
goTenna was founded in 2012, selling 150,000 consumer devices before executing a market pivot in 2018 to focus on the business-to-government (B2G) market. In the three years since, the company has sold into nearly 350 institutional customers across government agencies and enterprise organizations.
About Ari Schuler: Ari Schuler took over as goTenna’s CEO in 2021 after twin experiences that prepared him for the role. He spent a decade working in startup and technology companies, and nearly a decade in federal service - at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Customs and Border Protection, where he created and led the CBP Innovation Team (CBP INVNT).
His entrepreneurial mindset led him to become one of the most renowned government innovators. He did it by recognizing that despite DoD’s budget advantage and scale, Customs and Border Protection could become a coveted partner for startups by being the “first mover” - helping startups get their stuff working quickly, and spotting transition opportunities from afar. The playbook became “CBP first, SOCOM second, everyone else third.”
goTenna’s Early Days: From Commercial to Government
goTenna was founded in 2012 following Hurricane Sandy, when power and communications were knocked out in New York and the surrounding area. The founders set out to build a solution that hikers and preppers and other extreme adventurers could use to maintain connectivity in harsh environments. This was cool, but to hear Ari tell it, quickly emerged as “interesting, but a vitamin.”
That all changed when the government came into the picture. When government customers got their hands on the technology, all of sudden lives were being saved on practically a daily basis.
The two use cases were:
Long Range Communications: This use case is about helping organizations maintain connectivity in parts of the planet where there is no readily-available cell service (e.g., Artic, Africa, etc.) - law enforcement, search and rescue, and the military operate in these regions.
Interoperability: The government has an interoperability problem (recall our STITCHES case from Season 1), and goTenna helped solve it by allowing different agencies and allies to communicate with one another. Radios are often “frequency-locked” so that if 10 agencies showed up, only 3 might be able to communicate with each other. And when our military works with partner nations, they are often not equipped with the same military technology, so they struggle to communicate.
Products
The flagship product is the Pro-X series, which is about the size of an electric toothbrush, and allows you to build a large, low-bandwidth, difficult to detect network that can be used for public safety and military use cases.
GoKit allows operators to establish an entire mesh network in a box.
EdgeRelay is a permanent relay capability that you can set up atop a mountain, building, or even a tree, that lets you build a perpetual goTenna network.
Scaling up Success in the Defense Market
Ari believed in using non-dilutive funding (e.g., grants and R&D dollars such as SBIR) to stretch a company’s runway while getting customer validation. So when he came in as CEO, he immediately started going after AFWERX Open Topics.
One of their first government customers was the 147th ASOS, the Texas Air National Guard. The unit fit squarely under the interoperability and range use cases, since the National Guard is often charged with responding to disasters alongside multiple state, federal, and local agencies.
Any user of the Tactical Awareness Kit (TAK / ATAK) is a potential goTenna user, and that includes border patrol, as well as the Special Operations Community.
With clear user validation and demand for more goTenna devices, the company pursued a Strategic Financing Increase (STRATFI) via AFWERX, a program designed to help expand research & development efforts, while continuing to validate new technologies at larger scale, on the path to a larger program.
So as goTenna won this award, they also began a concerted outreach campaign to relevant program offices, both who support relevant capabilities and who might be users of the technology. As they learn about different parts of the special operations community who could benefit from the technology, they integrate them under the STRATFI umbrella rather than immediately seeking a new contract.
This means that as they hear about different potential use cases, or modifications to the existing product that could expand its reach and impact, goTenna moves quickly to deploy those solutions under this current award.
That doesn’t mean they built everything — goTenna uses a process to take an idea to the customer to validate and de-risk the technical and business elements before moving to build. This level of discernment is crucial for a company in a crowded industry with substantial distraction!
Key Themes and Takeaways
For Government Innovators
Go find all the friction points in your organization, and stitch them together: Ari did this at CBP and recommends it to any who seek to attract entrepreneurial attention. Identify the roadblocks. Then remove them.
Provide top cover to say yes: When trying something new, leadership matters. Giving folks the confidence that leadership will have their back for doing things differently can make all the difference.
Open the path to transition: Make it clear to companies and others how they can win. And then help them do so.
For Defense Tech Entrepreneurs
Maintain Empathy for the End User: One of the oft-recurring themes of this program is the requirement not only to understand, but to empathize with, your end user. Ari had led government innovation efforts, from small OTA awards to large procurements, and understood the processes and pathologies that underpin and accelerate or frustrate government “innovation” efforts.
Get a Trial under $10K: goTenna is cheap enough to sell on a government purchase card (“p-card”) which has a $10,000 upper limit. This is essential because which means the company is able to give the customer radios that are off to the races immediately. The faster you get product in the hands of customers, the faster you can scale. “The biggest thing besides getting money is getting real user feedback, and figuring out how to do it in the government procurement system as quickly as possible.”
Integrate to grow the pie. GoTenna did a lot of outreach to relevant programs and user groups under its AFWERX STRATFI contract. Rather than immediately attempt to get a new contract with each of them, the company integrated them under the existing STRATFI umbrella, to get them using the product as quickly as possible.
Government sales is a game of survival. Focus on hitting Singles and Doubles, not home runs. B2G sales is fundamentally different than what VCs in other industries look for. Ari says B2G VC actually looks more like traditional private equity than Silicon Valley-style venture. “Build your startup to look much leaner and be as close to cost-neutral as you can. Because this market is hard.” You want to build a company that can survive until you reach the level of traction that allows you to add programmatic revenue and stability.
For more on GoTenna, check out GoTenna.com!
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