Doug Abts is joining Astranis’s C-suite as its new chief commercial officer. Abts, a former Navy SEAL and grad of Harvard Business School, comes to Astranis by way of Viasat, where he was GM of the publicly traded company’s in-flight connectivity (IFC) business. Abts grew Viasat’s IFC biz into a “multi-hundred million dollar in annual revenue business,” Astranis CEO John Gedmark told Payload.
“I think it just speaks to all the momentum that we have been gaining in our commercial sales,” Gedmark said. “We’ve had a huge amount of success with a very small sales team and effectively zero marketing spend.” With Astranis’s new facility and production ramp, “we’re pretty excited about blowing it out of the water.”
Astranis has already leased its first MicroGEO out to Pacific Dataport, an Anchorage-based satellite middle-mile provider, to provide comprehensive coverage across the sparsely populated state of Alaska. In December 2021, Astranis also announced a deal with Andesat, a Peruvian telco, to extend connectivity to underserved, remote pockets of Peru—and help cell networks leapfrog from 2G to 4G across the country.
And there’s more to come. “Stay tuned,” Gedmark told Payload. “We have multiple signed commercial contracts that we have not announced yet.”
