California-born satellite communications firm Skyloom plants flag in Broomfield

BROOMFIELD — In an effort to tap into Colorado’s talent pipeline, the rapidly growing satellite communications firm Skyloom Global Corp. has moved its headquarters from Oakland, California, to Broomfield. 

Skyloom, which is developing technology that it describes as “orbital infrastructure for fiberless internet,” is building out manufacturing and office space in Broomfield’s Interlocken business park.

The company, with more than 100 workers and hopes to roughly double its workforce in the next year or so, has won contracts with government and military agencies, “which really drove the need to expand,” Eric Moltzau, Skyloom’s newly hired chief commercial officer, told BizWest. “The area around Broomfield has a lot of aerospace talent and a lot of talent with telecommunications backgrounds.”

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Skyloom plans to tap into talent pipelines from local colleges such as the University of Colorado and Colorado State University, along with military personnel transitioning into the private sector.

Both Moltzau and Skyloom’s newly appointed general counsel Catharine Parnell are military veterans.

“When somebody invites you to take a seat on a rocket ship, you don’t say no,” said former U.S. Army Judge Advocate General’s Corps. attorney Parnell, whose new job as Skyloom’s top lawyer is her first outside of the government.

Skyloom had been considering locations for its expansion outside of California for about a year, but the decision to plant its flag in Broomfield “was a relatively recent development,” said Moltzau, a U.S. Air Force veteran. 

Skyloom, as a space telecommunications company, appears to be a natural fit in the Boulder Valley, which is already home to a host of seemingly complementary organizations from satellite-imagery giant Maxar Technologies Inc. (NYSE: MAXR), to private space-travel technology developer Sierra Space Corp., to inflight-communications company Gogo Inc. (Nasdaq: GOGO).

“By 2030, billions of terabytes of data will need to be transmitted to, across, and from space. Skyloom provides fiberless optical communications at the speed of business,” Skyloom said. “The company’s planetary-scale solutions for ultra high-bandwidth communications unlock secure, high-capacity data transport for satellite-to-satellite, satellite-to-earth, and earth-to-satellite transmissions.”

Interconnectivity and communication is important, Moltzau said, whether you’re on a week-long cruise in the Caribbean or, perhaps in the not-too-distant future, on vacation at a privately operated space station. “With the expansion of space tourism, we’re going to need an expansion of the internet into a space internet to keep people connected and to conduct business.”