Programmable connectivity is the foundation of autonomy itself, according to the co-founder and CEO of TEAL, Robby Hamblet. Hamblet joined the Dawn of Autonomy podcast and spent 45 minutes making a case that connectivity is not simply a supporting utility for beyond visual line (BVLOS) of sight drone operations, but rather the infrastructure that determines whether autonomy works at all.
Automotive eSIM Pioneer Focuses On Drone Connectivity
Hamblet’s path into drones started years before drones entered the picture. He worked at an MVNE (mobile virtual network enabler), building the infrastructure behind MVNOs like OnStar, which rode on top of major carrier towers while billing customers directly through General Motors rather than through the underlying carrier. That work put him inside some of the world’s earliest SGP.02 eSIM deployments, the technical standard that allows a device’s carrier profile to be reprogrammed remotely instead of fixed at manufacture. GM and Daimler, two of Hamblet’s early clients, needed that flexibility because connected vehicles change hands, cross borders and require different network credentials depending on where they operate.
The problem Hamblet kept running into, however, was scale. Every automaker that wanted this capability had to rebuild it from scratch. “Every single time somebody tried to access this technology, it was a two-year project and millions of dollars in spend to try to operationalize it,” he said. GM and Daimler could absorb that cost because of their size. Nobody else could.
So in 2018, Hamblet and co-founder Michael Johnston set out to fix that gap by building TEAL as a multi-tenant orchestration layer instead of a bespoke project for any single client. One integration would become available to every customer rather than locked to one automaker.
That automotive-era insight now translates into drones. Hamblet explained that BVLOS fleets face the same fragmentation automakers faced: multiple countries, multiple carriers, regional coverage gaps and a need for telemetry backhaul that just works. “As drones moved from pilots into long-range and global commercial operations, we saw the same requirements emerge,” he said. Industry parallels include multiple networks, reliable data links, low latency and the need to scale without multiplying vendor relationships and administrative overhead.
As the company moves into its fourth year of commercial operation, Hamblet continues growing the team, driven by the fact that solving connectivity problems isn’t just a job for him, but a genuine interest. And the market continues to validate the team’s work and the automotive-to-drone thesis TEAL was built on. The company was placed on the 2026 Inc. 5000 list for a second consecutive year and has been ranked as the fastest-growing company in Washington State and the Seattle metro area.
What’s In a Name? The TEAL Story
Before the technology, though, there was the name choice. Hamblet and Johnston did not choose it casually. They wanted something broad enough to signal ambition rather than a narrow product category. “You should pick a name that has a broadness to it, like a general sense,” Hamblet said. What does Uber have to do with ridesharing? It just means ‘big.’” He also pointed to Cucumber, the open-source testing framework, as another example of a name with no literal connection to its function, noting that the vaguer a name feels, the more ambitious the company behind it seems.
Teal, the color, fits that brief. Hamblet noted that most primary colors already belong to a brand in the public imagination. Blue evokes Facebook, magenta evokes T-Mobile, black evokes Uber, white evokes Apple. Teal had no such owner. “What is teal? he asked. “We’d like that to be Teal.io, our company.”
He also offered a more poetic meaning. Blend the green of the land with the blue of the sea and you get teal, a color that suggests a globe. This, they felt, fit their company which aims to unify connectivity across any network and geography on the planet.
The company’s mascot, a chameleon, further anchors TEAL’s vision. A chameleon changes color to match its environment, which mirrors what TEAL’s platform does with network credentials. It communicates the company’s core idea: programmability.
Techno Autonomy and the Case for Network-Level Independence
Ask Hamblet what separates a connected drone from a genuinely autonomous one, and he does not start with flight software. He starts with the network. “I describe myself as a techno-autonomy champion,” he explained, before comparing the idea to right-to-repair advocacy. “You should be able to change and control something you own. You bought the physical hardware, now you’ve got this capability and you shouldn’t be hamstrung from being able to push it further.”
The parallel to right-to-repair is deliberate. Just as consumers have pushed back against manufacturers who lock down hardware they legally own, Hamblet argues that operators who buy a drone should not find themselves locked into a single carrier’s coverage footprint by default. He described how traditional deployments tie a device to one carrier’s tools, firmware and coverage map from the start. When a mission requires a different network in a different location, the operator is stuck.
Even so, Hamblet does not accuse carriers of bad faith. He offered what he called an “angel’s advocate” reading. These are hard technical products to deliver, and building them around one network often produces the best experience for that network. That is the constraint TEAL’s platform is built to remove.
Rather than soldering a single carrier’s SIM onto a drone at manufacture, TEAL lets an operator install a reprogrammable chip or card, then log into a portal and switch carriers with a click. The user can test which network performs best at a given site without a technician ever touching the hardware again. Hamblet pointed out that the best network for a mission can shift month to month as coverage and load change, which makes flexibility a mission requirement, not a convenience.
Why Connectivity Is Infrastructure, Not an Afterthought
Hamblet insisted that autonomy is not fundamentally a software problem. Flight algorithms and onboard sensors matter, but a drone flying BVLOS depends on continuous communication for command and control, telemetry, GPS and video. If that link runs through a single carrier with a coverage gap or an outage, he said, “the mission is constrained,” regardless of onboard software capabilities.
Hamblet described connectivity as an extension of the infrastructure people already recognize instinctively, like power lines and fiber optic cable. “Everything gets considered infrastructure until you can’t physically see it with your eye,” he said. He argued that the airwaves connecting a drone to its ground station deserve the same institutional weight as the fiber that already qualifies. He noted an irony in how capital markets treat this space: companies making six-inch cables for data centers draw enormous valuations, while the carriers stringing together multi-mile connections across entire regions, arguably a more complex feat of engineering, do not command the same multiples.
That infrastructure mindset shapes how TEAL’s redundancy works in practice. If a drone’s primary network dips below a minimum required throughput or drops out entirely, TEAL’s platform can trigger a failover to a second or third carrier in real time, without requiring the pilot to intervene or issue an emergency landing order. Hamblet compared it to multipath TCP, the same technical approach that lets a data stream continue across two different IP addresses. He said that when configured correctly, the transition looks more like brief video jitter than an interruption. “A connected asset is a safe asset,” he said. Reliable connectivity is a safety requirement on par with having a working camera on an autonomous vehicle.
What’s Next for TEAL
Hamblet pointed to two product priorities on the near horizon. The first is what TEAL calls “bring your own SIM,” a move toward compatibility with chipsets that already ship with an eSIM embedded. With this move, onboarding will become entirely digital rather than requiring a customer to order a separate TEAL chip or card. The second is a set of AI-driven tools for network operations teams to manage device fleets across their full life cycle, though Hamblet said those features are still too early in development to detail publicly.
Beyond drones, Hamblet said the same connectivity model is extending into ground robotics and energy infrastructure, areas where regulatory mandates around connectivity have not yet caught up to aviation’s framework.
For an industry racing toward scaled BVLOS operations, Hamblet’s closing point doubled as a warning. Regulatory clearance under frameworks like Part 108 will open airspace, but it will not by itself make operations safe or reliable. That depends on whether the connectivity underneath the aircraft can adapt as fast as the mission demands it to.