The View from the Office.

I met up with Sauli Kiviranta, founder and CEO of Delta Cygni Labs, at the Chelsea Diner. We both had omelettes.

Sauli is from Tampere, Finland, an industrial city of about 250,000 people with two universities and a manufacturing base. He was in New York for meetings a day before heading to Houston and then Austin for South by Southwest.

The company’s origins trace back to research at the Technical Research Center of Finland and early work with the European Space Agency. The initial focus was on how to enable ground control to remotely guide astronauts through complex technical tasks in real time. The challenge turned out to be the connectivity.

Unreliable networks quietly destroy performance in ways most people don’t realize. Sauli’s team built a purely software and algorithmic solution to fix that.

I first met Sauli in 2023 when he came to the U.S. for the first time. We were both at the Build Summit organized by Anthony Pompliano. It was there he said that he learned he needed to pivot.

He realized the market wasn’t interested in connectivity infrastructure. People wanted a solution to make any data transaction between a user, a device, and a server faster and more reliable.

The best demonstration of what the technology can do came the moment he landed at JFK on this trip.

After he arrived, he bought a T-Mobile SIM at the airport, connected to 5G, and remotely piloted a drone sitting in his company’s office back in Tampere — running on a 4G network on the other side of the Atlantic. 

He posted about it on LinkedIn: “Just landed to NYC! What is the first thing to do when you arrive to hotel? Obviously remoting a drone from NYC to Finland over T-Mobile 5G (US) as remote operator while the drone in Tampere is on DNA 4G (EU)!”

The application has serious military and industrial applications.

In Ukraine, drone operators need to stay dangerously close to the front lines because the controllers require proximity to their aircraft. Sauli’s technology would allow those operators to be pulled back to safety and also quickly redeployed.

The same principle applies to remote mining operations, medical tools, and first responder communications. 

You can connect with Sauli via LinkedIn or DM me for a warm intro.