I recently eclipsed my first year as CEO of Kymeta. What an exciting ride of change, challenges, and opportunities! I wanted to reflect on this year and what it holds for the coming years at Kymeta.

The Journey to Kymeta

First, as a semiconductor veteran, what attracted me to Kymeta? The company has a unique technology, metamaterials, that provides a key differentiator in the market, especially as the industry pivots to a more software-defined, versatile environment. The team at Kymeta, including the Board of Directors, was also inspirational as they are highly committed to bringing the technology to market. And lastly, with the combination of the team and technology, we can do something very big at Kymeta that is not only important to the satellite communication industry but also to the world.

Bridging Industries: From Semiconductors to Satellite Communications

As a very long-time executive in the semiconductor industry, moving over to satellite industry meant new customers, ecosystem, and technology. Several of the differences in the industries were quite fascinating.

In a semiconductor company, for the most part, you provide products and technologies to some type of OEM that then goes to the market. There is a frenetic pace of innovation while also absolute adherence to your customers' schedules that are invariably tied to annual or even shorter periods that must be achieved. Moving to the satcom industry, the cycles tend to be longer, and schedules from all participants appear to be general targets, with pushouts of months or years not uncommon.

Starlink has already shocked the industry with their Silicon Valley approach, leaving numerous competitors in their wake. At Kymeta, it is imperative that we adopt a similar mindset around being the industry's innovator, being first to market, and creating the world's best product while also hitting our committed schedules to our partners. All of my three decades of technology experience indicate that the company that innovates fastest wins.

Strategic Focus and Market Positioning

Of course, focusing on the right technologies and markets is also critical to our success. Kymeta is unique in the market by using metamaterials. In some ways, metamaterials give Kymeta an unfair advantage. We are able to offer multi-orbit, multi-band, and multi-network all within the same antenna. These capabilities are truly software-defined to give us and our customers the ultimate in flexibility and resilience.

This doesn't come free, so we are not targeting the fixed, consumer-grade satellite terminals. Instead, I pivoted the company to focus on the premium markets such as military, government, and enterprise.

Along with this pivot, we set out to move to parallel execution on our engineering front. The teams were already stretched but quickly adopted techniques such as rapid prototyping and advanced modeling to increase the productivity of the engineers. Likewise, our Board and investors supported the idea of incremental R&D investments to accelerate our time to market. I also challenged our collective teams to "build the best" to assure our leadership in the satellite industry. Note that Kymeta is already the clear leader in multi-orbit and multi-network solutions, with our ESAs blazing the path these past few years.

Breakthrough Innovation: The Ku/Ka Proof of Concept

The outcome of that challenge is our recently announced "Ku/Ka" demonstration. Despite years of effort, no other company in the industry has been able to achieve the capability of multiple bands, multi-orbits, and multi-networks within the same aperture. Four simultaneous bands all transmitting/receiving within the same antenna! This will open all kinds of possibilities for our customers and partners in the coming years.

At Kymeta, we are shifting from the notion that the satellite terminal is just a dumb terminal that provides simple connectivity to the concept that we provide an intelligent platform capable of an array of technologies driven by software-defined capabilities including programmability, AI, and other advanced features.