The company uses wireless antennas to provide internet, rather than cables or fiber. | Image: Starry
Starry, the ISP that delivers internet to your home using wireless antennas instead of cables, is laying off around half its workforce, or just over 500 people, according to a statement from the company and a report in The Boston Globe. The company is also telling investors that they can no longer count on the expectations it set for this year â information that probably doesnât come as a surprise after its earnings report this summer revealed that it had around $100 million in cash and had lost almost $90 million since the beginning of 2022.
Starry says itâs also freezing hiring and non-essential expenditures, again in order to âcurtail our cash burn while we pursue strategic options,â as Chet Kanojia, the companyâs CEO, put it in a statement included in the press release.
Another part of its cost-cutting measures includes scaling back on its expansion plans. In August, Starry said it was âstrongly positioned to continue on its growth trajectory,â but now itâs saying it plans on focusing on the places where itâs âalready invested capital,â as in the places its network can already reach. The company didnât directly answer The Vergeâs question about whether that meant it would stop expanding to new locations and buildings altogether. As it announced last week, Starry wonât be fulfilling the bids it won through the FCCâs Rural Digital Opportunity Fund, which were set to net it $269 million, according to Light Reading.
The company operates in Boston, Denver, Los Angeles, New York City, Washington, DC, and Columbus, Ohio, and its Thursday report says it currently has more than 91,000 âcustomer relationships,â its term for both individual users and ones included in bulk billing agreements. Thatâs in contrast to the nearly 6 million homes it says its service can reach.
Starry launched in 2016, promising to provide gigabit internet using wireless networks instead of more traditional DSL, cable, or fiber infrastructure. It works by using a big antenna that beams data to other, smaller antennas spread across a city, which then connect to more traditional routers. Part of its business plan involves teaming up with building owners so companies that run apartments could offer the service to tenants.
The company went public earlier this year via a SPAC (read: a merger with a shell company thatâs already gone public, which helps skip the traditional IPO phase), raising around $176 million, according to the Globe. Since then, its stock has cratered; it peaked in June at around $10.61 but is currently trading at around $1.15. That makes it very difficult for Starry to raise cash, which its own press release notes that it needs. We likely wonât know just how much it has left in the bank until November 2nd, when the company releases its Q3 results.
Starry is far from the only company laying off employees as the economy turns. Basically every industry has seen large job cuts, with companies like Ford, Snap, Crypto.com, Tesla, Wayfair, and Warner Bros. Television letting hundreds or thousands of employees go.