We are excited that Founders Fund has led a Series C financing for goTenna. It is a recognition of the tremendous progress the company has made in serving the communication needs of first responders and other professionals. The goTenna Prooffering works with mobile phones to provide 100% off-grid communication using advanced mobile mesh networking protocols. It also integrates directly with field software such as ATAK to provide the highest level of situational awareness.
The most impressive part of goTenna’s progress also happens to be the least visible. The company is a leader in mesh networking protocols and has developed novel, highly scalable techniques for mesh routing and broadcasting. Together these innovations mean that goTenna can support more data for more devices at lower battery drain. This was recently verified in a study conducted together with the University of Delaware.
But that’s not all. Recently Global Mesh Labs, a goTenna subsidiary, released the Lot49 protocol for incentivized message delivery. This protocol, which is independent of the networking stack (i.e. can be used with networking stacks other than goTenna), allows for the payment of tokens for message delivery ultimately settling out to a blockchain. The protocol builds on top of bitcoin and uses an architecture that’s similar to the payment channels in the Lightning Network.
We look forward to seeing what else Daniela and the team at goTenna deliver in the coming years. (They are hiring for both remote and Brooklyn-based positions.) There is much work out that remains to be done to get us off the centralized, infrastructure-heavy networks on which most of our current communications are dependent.