What Happened to Sonnet Mesh?

The short question is: the project raised a lot of money, promised delivery, and then what? The answer has to separate the stages, because "announced", "crowdfunded", "had a prototype", "promised shipping", "verified shipping and commercialisation" and "later status" are different things, and the evidence for each is not the same.

2017 - announced and crowdfunded

Sonnet was developed by Sonnet Labs, a company in Toronto, Canada. The Kickstarter campaign, titled "Sonnet: World's Most Advanced Off-Grid Mobile Mesh Network", ran in the summer of 2017 with a goal of $17,000 and raised about $226,000 from around 1,700 backers - far past the goal. The project then continued raising money on Indiegogo. The stated estimated delivery date was November 2017.

According to the campaign, Sonnet was a rugged, water-resistant pocket device (IP66) with a 4,000 mAh battery that doubled as a power bank, pairing to a phone through a Wi-Fi access point accessed via a web app at app.sonnetlabs.com. It used a proprietary radio protocol (chirp spread spectrum modulation, the same family as LoRa) in the 915/868/433 MHz bands, and was marketed with messaging, voice recordings, images, GPS sharing, offline maps, an SOS button and AES encryption.

2018-2019 - development and delays

The November 2017 delivery date was missed. Post-campaign updates gave reasons: an industrial redesign of the enclosure for strength and water resistance, and - more significantly - FCC and CE certification hurdles that required changes to the long-range radio module. These pushed the timeline back repeatedly.

Around 2019 - partial shipping

There is evidence that some devices reached backers around 2019. A write-up reconstructing one early recipient's setup reported that chat between two devices worked, but the mesh functions did not; that official documentation was missing and some support pages returned 404 errors; and estimated that the project by then had "maybe 1 or 2 people" working on fulfilment. Over the same period, many backers on both Kickstarter and Indiegogo said they were still waiting.

Around 2020 - public updates slow down

Public campaign updates appear to thin out and stop around late 2020. After that, the public record becomes very sparse.

The present

As of this research (September 2026), the domains sonnetlabs.com and app.sonnetlabs.com no longer resolve in DNS - meaning the official website and the web app the device needed in order to operate are both offline.

What is not confirmed

From the public sources available, the following remain unclear, and this article does not assert them:

• The total number of devices actually delivered to backers.
• Whether Sonnet Labs was formally wound up or simply became inactive.
• Whether the Indiegogo campaign was a separate round or an InDemand continuation of the Kickstarter.
• Whether the web app ever worked reliably at scale.
• Exactly when the website went offline.

No public evidence points to a specific "shutdown" date, a bankruptcy or a formal discontinuation announcement - only a successfully funded project that shipped late and partially, then went quiet.

What this means for you

If you have a Sonnet, see Does Sonnet Mesh Still Work? If you liked the idea and want a current option, Sonnet Mesh Alternatives and the off-grid communication guide walk through the workable directions.