ViaSat Inc.

History

Mr. Mark D. Dankberg founded ViaSat Incorporated in May of 1986 alongside co-founders Mark Miller and Steve Hart. Prior to ViaSat, he served as an Assistant Vice President of M/A-COM Linkabit from 1979-1986. Today, Dankberg is chairman and CEO, while Miller and Hart are chief technical officers. ViaSat’s initial business was to obtain contracts for engineering and proposal support to defense prime contractors bidding satellite programs. A few years later, ViaSat obtained venture financing of $300,000 from Southern California Ventures. ViaSat sought a vertical integration approach and under one roof, assembled all of the technologies they needed to design and develop complete satellite and wireless communication systems from microprocessing chips to satellite payloads. This approach proved successful and the company made its initial public offering in December of 1996 ticker VSAT. In 2001, they created the spin-off company TrellisWare Technologies to focus on ViaSat patented Per Survivor Processing technology. That same year ViaSat acquired Comsat Labs from Lockheed Martin and purchased US Monolithics. By 2011, ViaSat set record revenues of $801 million; the company’s patented ViaSat-1 became the highest capacity satellite in the world. In 2013, ViaSat Inc. contributed $1 million to the University of California, San Diego’s Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination. Both Mark Miller and Steve Hart hold degrees from UCSD. Today ViaSat remains a global leader in satellite technology.

Company website: http://www.viasat.com

Company history: http://www.viasat.com/company/about/company-history

Company timeline: http://www.viasat.com/company/about/viasat-timeline