Totum Labs

Totum Labs is a San Diego, California-based satellite IoT connectivity company founded in 2018 by CEO Dr. Ted Myers. The company invented Doppler Multichannel Spread Spectrum (DMSS), a wireless waveform delivered over a constellation of Low Earth Orbit nanosatellites that connects low-power sensors and trackers directly to space, including indoors, without gateways, SIMs, or external antennas.

At the heart of the technology is the DMSS 3990 endpoint System-on-Chip, a highly integrated Low Power Sensor-to-Satellite (LP-S2S) ASIC co-developed with Orca Systems on a 22nm Global Foundries process. The chip combines a DMSS modem, RF transceiver, baseband and application processors, and power management in an 8x8mm QFN package, enabling battery life beyond 10 years and location fixes to roughly 20 meters via multilateration, without a GNSS receiver. The unlicensed 2.4 GHz ISM-band design allows a single global SKU with no roaming agreements and coexistence with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.

In September 2021, Totum demonstrated the world's first indoor, bidirectional direct-to-satellite IoT connection, using a miniature omnidirectional antenna in a San Diego office building, and announced advance orders for roughly 2 million connected devices from OEM, solution-provider and value-added-reseller partners. In November 2020, the company closed a $13 million Series A round co-led by Heroic Ventures and Space Capital, with participation from Qualcomm co-founder Dr. Andrew Viterbi and strategic investor Qamcom, bringing total funding to $15.5 million and building on the DMSS 3990 chip tape-out and four foundational patents.

Totum's go-to-market model targets asset-tracking and condition-monitoring applications across logistics, supply chain, agriculture, transportation, energy and industrial markets, positioning its DMSS network as a lower-cost, longer-battery-life, globally uniform alternative to cellular NB-IoT and legacy satellite IoT offerings. Key partners include Orca Systems (silicon) and Loft Orbital (space segment/ground infrastructure).