Building the infrastructure for connected devices

Wave RF was started by Eric Andrechek and a group of University of Michigan students as a part of Professor Eric Fretz's entrepreneurship course in fall of 2023. These students identified the inability to reliably communicate during football games at the Big House, and started envisioning a product that would let users communicate over radio waves, without a reliance on the overloaded cellular and internet infrastructure.

Simultaneously, Eric Andrechek and Jack Woods were working on a research project to build a high-altitude weather balloon payload capable of transmitting telemetry data back to the cloud and to ground stations and chase vehicles in realtime. They realized that there were few off-the-shelf solutions that could provide reliable data transmission over long distances without relying on existing infrastructure, especially in remote areas. This experience further solidified their belief in the need for a resilient communication solution.

Combining their experiences and insights, Eric and Jack officially incorporated Wave RF in March of 2024. They envisioned a simple and affordable off-the-shelf solution that could allow for seamless switching between multiple communication technologies—such as LoRa, cellular, and Wi-Fi—to provide reliable communication to everyone, from app users at a crowded event to emergency responders in disaster zones.

Building that telemetry stack surfaced a second problem: getting data off the edge was only half the job. Storing and querying it live, at volume, was just as hard. ClickHouse was the right database for it and the hardest thing to operate, so the team built the data layer they wanted and open-sourced it as WaveHouse. Today Wave RF is two lines of infrastructure under one roof: the connectivity that moves the data, and the data layer that makes it useful.