Celebrating our environmental partners on Earth Day

Happy Earth Day! Today is a time to reflect on the environmental challenges we face, but also celebrate the people and innovations that will play a role in improving our planet’s health. Swarm’s mission to provide global, affordable connectivity has special meaning on Earth Day.

Internet of Things (IoT) sensor devices and the insights they provide have the potential to transform how we tackle everything from CO2 emissions to air pollution to droughts. The more high-quality data we have from around the globe, the better equipped we are to truly understand the problems we face, and how best to approach solutions. The IoT devices that gather this data, however, are often deployed in remote areas, which can make it difficult and expensive to connect them to the Internet.

Many of our customers are developing and deploying novel IoT solutions to address global issues, and Swarm provides the infrastructure to transmit the data that their devices collect at an affordable price point. Today, we are highlighting three of our partners that are tackling different environmental challenges. By providing them with low cost, global connectivity, Swarm will enable these companies to expand the scope of their operations, and put more resources toward fulfilling their missions.

The ocean environment affects our daily lives through weather, food, transportation, and more, yet data on our oceans is exceedingly limited. Sofar is deploying the world’s largest real-time ocean weather sensor network, which provides the most accurate marine weather information and forecasts to power industry-specific solutions. Maritime shipping companies, for example, use Sofar to optimize shipping routes, reducing fuel usage by up to 10% and cutting CO2 emissions by up to 20%.

Sofar’s ability to gather large amounts of ocean data is dependent on deploying large numbers of sensing buoys, and having that data back transmitted to land. With Swarm’s connectivity solution, Sofar can afford to deploy thousands of sensors, providing more data points and better insights for their customers, and contributing to a greater understanding of the environment, improved business outcomes, and a more sustainable planet. 

Droughts are a serious and increasing threat to communities around the world. SweetSense is working to end drought emergencies globally through the tracking, trading, and conservation of water. With almost a decade of experience in remote East Africa monitoring millions of people’s water supplies on a daily basis, SweetSense is also now turning westward, helping farmers in the United States conserve water and energy. 

SweetSense develops and deploys technologies to manage water and energy services in remote, off-the-grid environments. Their low-cost, satellite-connected sensors are compatible with a wide range of fixed infrastructure, and leverage machine learning to create dynamic responses to water and energy management opportunities. Swarm will drive significant cost-savings for SweetSense, enabling them to reach 10x the amount of people, livestock and croplands with verified access to water through their monitoring systems.

Read more about Swarm and SweetSense’s work to improve groundwater sustainability.

Sacramento-based eze System creates Industrial IoT (IIoT) solutions designed for monitoring, control, automation, and consolidation of any type of remote sensor across industries, including environmental monitoring. eze’s goal is to solve complex control and automation challenges with easy-setup and future-proof systems. These capabilities make their ezeio solutions ideal for environmental applications, where devices often need to be quickly deployed in remote areas, integrate with new and existing sensing infrastructure, and monitor multiple parameters at the same time, such as air quality, temperature, humidity, wind speed, or acidity. Their system can simultaneously accommodate multiple sensors of almost any brand and type.

Swarm will turn eze into a truly global 2-way communication system, allowing eze’s customers to deploy their environmental monitoring solutions anywhere they’re needed. This opens up many new applications for devices that need to be deployed in rural or remote locations that lack reliable terrestrial-based connectivity solutions.  Swarm’s affordable data service also means the eze solution can now be used for applications and volumes that were previously not feasible due to complexity, time, and cost of legacy offerings.

Low-cost, global connectivity is enabling use cases that would never have previously been possible, since the high cost of satellite made it inaccessible to all but a few deep-pocketed companies. With Swarm, companies can gather data from remote locations and deploy devices at scale, allowing them to collect more data than ever. Many of the planet’s change makers can’t be effective without the ability to transmit data to and from anywhere on Earth. Swarm enables that, at 4-20x lower price point than legacy satellite providers. A global network to support our partners that are creating global solutions!