goTenna

Of every mesh-hardware company built for hikers and preppers, goTenna is the one that survived by abandoning that market outright, and it got acquired for doing so. The company’s own internal verdict on consumer demand, that off-grid texting is a vitamin and not a painkiller, turned out to be the most useful sentence in the category: people buy a $179 radio pair once, use it twice a year, and never come back for a second purchase. goTenna took that lesson and rebuilt itself around a customer who needs the product weekly: government.

The pivot

Daniela and Jorge Perdomo started the company in 2012, months after Hurricane Sandy knocked out roughly a quarter of New York’s cell towers, on the idea of a Bluetooth-paired radio that lets a phone text and share location with zero signal. The first device shipped in 2014; a second generation, goTenna Mesh, added true multi-hop relaying and funded itself through a Kickstarter that closed on October 28, 2016 with $582,473 raised against a $150,000 goal. (Some earlier accounts, including our own prior notes, misdate that campaign to 2018; the Kickstarter record itself says 2016.) Consumer sales topped out around 150,000 units, a number that shows up in founder interviews but not in any audited filing.

By March 2017, goTenna had launched a Pro line and committed to selling into defense and public safety instead. A $24M Series C in 2019, backed by Founders Fund, USV, Comcast Ventures, and Lockheed Martin Ventures, financed the shift, but the growth after that ran almost entirely on non-dilutive federal money: SBIR awards, an AFWERX Phase II anchored by the Texas Air National Guard’s 147th Air Support Operations Squadron, and a $15M AFWERX STRATFI contract in September 2024. Reported total equity raised sits around $35M in most tallies, though one outlet put the figure at $92M “raised since 2013” at the time of acquisition, a gap that likely reflects debt and grant money folded into the larger number.

What it is

Under the hood, goTenna is a stand-alone radio, not an app: a phone pairs to the device over Bluetooth, and the radio does the actual long-range hop over a proprietary protocol the company calls Aspen Grove, plus a broadcast layer called ECHO for one-to-many traffic. The consumer Mesh ran on 900 MHz ISM; the current Pro X2 line moved to VHF/UHF. Payloads stay deliberately thin, text and GPS position reports only, and the pitch to government buyers runs through deep TAK/ATAK integration and a licensed SDK. A companion product, goTenna + EVERYWHERE, backstops the mesh with satellite connectivity for genuine long-haul reach.

The Air Force is one customer among many. goTenna counts every branch of the US military as a customer and claims 350-plus government, military, and public safety agencies overall, though that figure comes from the company’s own site rather than a third party. Customs and Border Protection holds a $99M IDIQ ceiling for mesh gear across Border Patrol units, Texas Task Force 1 meshed multiple agencies at Mexico Beach during Hurricane Michael recovery work in 2018, and wildland fire crews used the gear through Colorado’s 2019-2021 fire seasons.

The exit

On October 9, 2025, autonomous-systems company Forterra bought goTenna outright, on undisclosed terms, and kept the unit intact as a business line with CEO Ari Schuler stepping into the President role. goTenna’s existing contracts, DHS, CBP, and Air Force among them, carried over, and Forterra reported tens of thousands of Pro X2 radios already fielded at the time of close. Forterra’s Josh Araujo promised goTenna comms riding on Forterra vehicles “within weeks” and joint products within three months, pointing to early 2026, but when Forterra unveiled four new mission modules at AUSA on October 13, 2025, goTenna wasn’t named in any of them. In hindsight, the fit had been telegraphed months earlier: a May 2025 product, the Pro X2m, packaged the mesh radio as a cartridge module meant to be embedded in drones, autonomous vessels, and vehicles, exactly Forterra’s market. A next-generation Pro X3, funded by the STRATFI contract, was slated to finish development this month, though nothing public confirms it has shipped.

Where it stands against this project

The clearest opening this project has comes from what goTenna stopped doing. Its 2017 turn to government, now sealed by the Forterra acquisition, left the free community-resilience use case, the ordinary person who wants coverage without a defense budget, sitting effectively empty. The harder comparison is architectural: goTenna needed a customer to buy a radio, then buy enough of them to blanket a venue, which is why its density problem got solved by agencies purchasing 20-unit kits rather than by any clever engineering. This project has no equivalent purchase step; coverage density comes from a Windows relay-hub architecture instead, always-on desktop relays that also route around iOS’s background-BLE limits, so venue coverage never depends on how many radios a buyer was willing to fund. The payload differs too: goTenna’s proprietary Aspen Grove protocol carries text and position reports only, while acks, delivery confirmation, compression, and last-known-location all run here over ordinary Bluetooth that people already carry in their pockets.