WASHINGTON — A 30-person, self-funded startup is building a channel-first business around one of the messier problems in enterprise and public sector connectivity: what happens when your network path fails and your backup is already gone?
Contrivian, headquartered in San Francisco, surfaced in broader industry conversation this week when it announced Contrivian Constellation, a service that orchestrates traffic across multiple low-Earth orbit satellite networks, including Starlink and Amazon Leo. The company is presenting the new satellite options, along with other connectivity paths, to customers as a single connection under one contract, with one IP address and one data plan.
The strategy falls in line with what Contrivian has built to date: a channel-driven, multimodal connectivity business that routes nearly all of its revenue through VARs, MSPs, and technology services distributors.
"Almost 100% of our customers come via channel in one form or another," CEO Grant Kirkwood told Channel Dive this week. "Most of our largest go-to-market partners are VARs — in some places, VARs trying to become MSPs."
The company started as a public-sector specialist — fire and life safety agencies, search and rescue, military and defense — where connectivity is an operational requirement. That mix still skews 60% to 70% public sector. Kirkwood said enterprise is now growing faster, and he expects the split to reach roughly 50/50 within a year.
The verticals driving Contrivian's customer shift are exactly the kinds of environments where wired infrastructure is unavailable, unreliable or simply hasn't caught up yet. These include hospitals connecting imaging equipment to cloud processing, manufacturers running remote sites, energy operators monitoring distributed infrastructure, and construction projects that need connectivity before fiber arrives.
"We started the business as a multimodal connectivity provider," Kirkwood said. "Fiber, broadband, wireless, multi-carrier LTE — in addition to the satellite stuff. It's usually a mix of those things."
That multimodal foundation is what distinguishes Contrivian from a satellite reseller. The technical architecture, built around the company's proprietary Lighthouse platform, runs all customer traffic through an overlay network that continuously probes every available path for health and performance. Tom Daly, CEO of Big Network — which is in the process of merging with Contrivian — described the problem the platform is designed to prevent.
"Primary internet is good. You decide to fail over to a backup. But something has happened to the backup and nobody knows the backup is gone," Daly said. "So now you have a double fault. In our tech stack, we're doing active probing of all paths and recording health metrics back to our NOC. We can analyze problems and be proactive before they become real issues."
The Big Network merger, announced in February, deepens Contrivian's edge capabilities, specifically, multi-WAN orchestration and Layer 2 transport intelligence. It also brings Daly into the combined company as a board member and principal technologist.
For channel partners evaluating Contrivian, the partner model has two tracks: a wholesale resale arrangement in which partners add their own margin, and a referral model that pays residuals. In the resale track, Contrivian offers a white-labeled portal — branded with the partner's logo and domain — that puts partners in the support role for their own end customers. Contrivian handles support directly in the referral model. Either way, Kirkwood was clear that this isn't a plug-and-play sell. "It is a more technical sell than just a fiber circuit," he said. "We're always engaged pretty deeply with a customer."
The company's multi-constellation architecture is operational today across Starlink and other paths, according to the announcement. The Amazon Leo integration is in testing, which reflects where Amazon Leo is in its own deployment. The company currently has 212 satellites in orbit, with more than 200 additional flight-ready spacecraft stacked and waiting at Cape Canaveral. Amazon said this week it completed 11 launches in its first year of deployment and is targeting more than 20 missions in year two. If it can sustain that pace, it would quickly expand coverage and capacity for partners like Contrivian building services on top of the constellation.
Contrivian spent its first two years almost entirely under the radar, working in the background, keeping its customers connected. For MSPs and VARs working with clients where the question isn't whether they need connectivity but what happens when it breaks, it's worth knowing who they are now.
