Who owns Starry? Ownership structure explained (2026)

Starry set out to break the local broadband monopoly. Instead of digging trenches for fiber, it beamed gigabit internet through the air using millimeter wave radios mounted on rooftops. The pitch was simple: deliver fast, cheap home internet to apartment buildings without the cost of wiring each unit. For a few years, that story attracted marquee investors and a multibillion-dollar valuation.

The ownership of Starry is really the story of how that pitch met reality. The company burned cash faster than it added subscribers, went public at the worst possible moment for speculative growth stocks, and filed for bankruptcy roughly a year after its debut. Its lenders took the keys, ran a leaner private company for two years, and then sold it to one of the incumbents it had once hoped to disrupt.

Today the answer to "who owns Starry" is straightforward, even if the path there was not. Starry belongs to Verizon. Getting to that answer means tracing an ownership arc that runs from venture capital, to public markets, to a bankruptcy court, to a telecom giant.

Chet Kanojia founded Starry and launched it publicly in Boston in January 2016. Kanojia was already known in media and telecom circles as the founder of Aereo, a service that streamed broadcast television over the internet until the Supreme Court ruled it violated copyright law in 2014. Starry was his next attempt to route around entrenched incumbents, this time in home broadband.

Starry's core product is fixed wireless internet. Rather than run cable or fiber to each home, the company installs base stations that transmit high-capacity signals over licensed millimeter wave spectrum to receivers on customer buildings. It focused on multi-dwelling units, the apartment and condo buildings where one rooftop antenna can serve many households. That model let Starry undercut cable pricing and offer plans with no data caps, no annual contracts, and flat pricing. Through its Starry Connect program, it also sold low-cost broadband to residents of affordable and public housing.

At its peak the company operated in Boston, New York, Los Angeles, Denver, and Washington, D.C. By the time Verizon acquired it, Starry served roughly 100,000 customers across those five markets, a small footprint relative to the national ambitions it once described. The company is now part of Verizon, which valued Starry's technology as a way to reach urban apartment buildings faster than its own network build could.

Starry is privately held and owned by Verizon Communications, a publicly traded company. It is no longer an independent business with its own stock. Between its 2023 bankruptcy exit and the Verizon deal, Starry was a private company controlled by its former lenders. Verizon's acquisition, which closed in March 2026, folded Starry into Verizon's broadband operations as a subsidiary.

That makes the current ownership picture simple. Anyone who owns Verizon stock owns a share of Starry, but there is no separate Starry security to buy. This is a sharp reversal from 2022, when Starry traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker STRY and anyone could buy in.

Chet Kanojia held a significant founder stake through Starry's private years and served as chairman and CEO. When Starry went public in 2022, he and other insiders held equity in the combined company, though the exact percentages shifted with the SPAC structure and later share issuance. Public filings disclosed insider holdings at the time of the merger, but Starry's stock lost nearly all its value within months.

The bankruptcy erased that equity. In a Chapter 11 reorganization, existing shareholders, including founders and management, are typically wiped out before creditors are repaid. Kanojia's founder stake did not survive the restructuring. After the company emerged as a private, lender-owned business in 2023, its equity sat with creditors rather than founders, and the post-bankruptcy cap table was never made public in detail.

Starry raised money across several private rounds, a SPAC merger, and bankruptcy financing. Exact figures for some rounds were never disclosed, and the amounts below reflect the most reliable public reporting.

FirstMark Capital was Starry's earliest and most persistent backer. The New York venture firm led early rounds and later sponsored the special purpose acquisition company, FirstMark Horizon Acquisition Corp., that took Starry public. FirstMark's founder, Rick Heitzmann, championed the company across both its private and public lives.

Tiger Global, IAC, and KKR joined as Starry scaled. Their capital funded the expensive work of deploying radios and signing up buildings in new cities. Fidelity, ArrowMark Partners, and Quantum Strategic Partners, an investment vehicle tied to Soros Fund Management, took part in later private rounds that pushed Starry's paper valuation past a billion dollars before its public debut.

ArrowMark deserves a second mention, because its role changed dramatically. ArrowMark shifted from equity investor to lender, and ArrowMark Agency Services acted as administrative agent for the secured debt that later put the company into bankruptcy. When Starry restructured, its secured lenders converted their debt into ownership. Those creditors, rather than the venture funds, controlled Starry until Verizon bought it.

Starry's stint as a public company was brief. It announced its merger with FirstMark Horizon Acquisition Corp. in October 2021 and completed the deal in late March 2022, listing on the NYSE as STRY at an implied value near $1.66 billion. The SPAC was supposed to deliver about $452 million in cash, but most SPAC investors redeemed their shares before the deal closed, leaving Starry with roughly $155 million, far less than planned.

That cash shortfall proved fatal. The stock slid below a dollar, the NYSE suspended trading in December 2022, and Starry filed for Chapter 11 in February 2023. The company emerged that summer under lender control and stayed private until Verizon agreed to acquire it in October 2025. Verizon closed the purchase in March 2026, making Starry part of a company whose fixed wireless ambitions gave the technology a much larger balance sheet to stand on. Verizon's own ownership is spread across public shareholders, as covered in who owns Verizon.

Chet Kanojia founded Starry and led it as chairman and CEO through its rise, its public listing, and the start of its bankruptcy. He is the throughline of the company's story, the same entrepreneur who built Aereo. In 2023, as part of the restructuring, Kanojia stepped down as CEO and moved to the board of directors.

Alex Moulle-Berteaux, a Starry co-founder and its former chief operating officer, became CEO in June 2023 and steered the company through its bankruptcy exit and its two years as a leaner private business. He led Starry until the Verizon acquisition closed. Joe Lipowski served as chief technology officer and was a key architect of Starry's millimeter wave systems.

Control of the company itself changed hands twice in a short window. From 2023 to 2026 the ultimate decision-makers were Starry's senior secured lenders, the creditors who took equity in the reorganization and appointed the reconstituted board. Since March 2026, control has rested with Verizon Communications, which now sets Starry's strategy and reports its results as part of a much larger broadband and wireless business.

Starry's greatest controversy was how quickly value evaporated for public investors. The company went public through a SPAC in March 2022, near the end of a boom in blank-check deals that later drew heavy criticism. Within months the stock fell from its listing level to pennies, and less than a year after the debut, Starry filed for bankruptcy. Public shareholders who bought STRY, including retail investors drawn in by the SPAC, saw their holdings zeroed out in the reorganization. The episode became a case study in how SPAC valuations often bore little relation to a company's cash needs. Investors weighing similar high-loss scenarios can model the downside with a business valuation calculator.

The New York Stock Exchange notified Starry in December 2022 that it would begin delisting proceedings and suspended trading immediately, because the average closing price had fallen below one dollar over a 30-day period. Trading moved to the over-the-counter market under the ticker STRY.Q before the shares were extinguished entirely in bankruptcy. The rapid delisting underscored how far the company had fallen from its multibillion-dollar SPAC valuation, and it is the kind of collapse risk that formal planning tools like a risk register template are built to track.

Starry's business depended on licensed millimeter wave spectrum, and it acquired 24 GHz licenses through an FCC auction to support its network. Those licenses were assets in both the SPAC story and the bankruptcy. The Verizon acquisition itself required FCC review and other regulatory clearances, since it transferred Starry's spectrum and operations to a national carrier. The deal cleared those conditions and closed in early 2026. The transaction handed Starry's spectrum and urban footprint to a company competing against cable operators like Comcast and satellite challengers such as SpaceX's Starlink.

Ownership shaped Starry's fate at every turn. As a venture-backed startup, it could raise large sums to fund an expensive network build without needing to turn a profit. That patient capital let the company promise fast growth. When it moved to public markets through a SPAC, the tolerance for cash burn vanished. Public investors punished the shortfall, the stock collapsed, and the company lost access to the funding its model required.

The shift to lender ownership then changed the company's goals. Creditors who convert debt to equity want a business that can survive and generate cash, not one chasing national scale. Under lender control, Starry shrank to five markets, cut costs, and aimed for profitability rather than expansion. That discipline kept the company alive, but it also capped its ambitions and made it a candidate for sale rather than a standalone growth story.

Verizon's ownership matters most of all for what happens next. Starry no longer has to fund itself. It plugs into a carrier with a national network, deep pockets, and a stated plan to reach far more fixed wireless customers. For Starry's roughly 100,000 subscribers, the change means their provider is now a telecom giant rather than a fragile startup. Verizon's incentive is to use Starry's technology and building relationships to reach apartment dwellers faster, competing with cable and other carriers, much as rivals like AT&T push their own broadband bundles.

For entrepreneurs and investors, Starry is a cautionary tale about matching a capital structure to a business model. A network that needs years of heavy spending is a poor fit for public markets that reward near-term results. The company's technology worked. Its ownership structure, moving from venture capital to public markets before the business could stand on its own, is what did not.

Verizon Communications owns Starry. Verizon closed its acquisition of the fixed wireless broadband provider in March 2026, making Starry a wholly owned subsidiary. Before that, Starry was a private company controlled by its former lenders after a 2023 bankruptcy.

Chet Kanojia founded Starry and launched it publicly in Boston in 2016. He had previously founded Aereo, a broadcast television streaming service that shut down in 2014 after losing a Supreme Court case. Alex Moulle-Berteaux, a co-founder and former chief operating officer, later served as CEO.

No. Starry is not publicly traded. It listed on the New York Stock Exchange as STRY in March 2022, but the stock was suspended in December 2022 and the shares were wiped out in the company's 2023 bankruptcy. Starry is now part of Verizon, which is publicly traded.

Starry raised hundreds of millions of dollars from venture and growth investors, including a $100 million round in 2018, before going public. Its 2022 SPAC merger was projected to add about $452 million in cash but delivered only around $155 million after investors redeemed most of their shares.

Starry's valuation swung dramatically. Late private rounds implied a value near $1.29 billion, and its 2022 SPAC merger valued the company at roughly $1.66 billion. Within a year the stock traded for pennies, the company filed for bankruptcy, and Verizon's 2026 purchase price was undisclosed but described as modest.

Starry's largest backers included FirstMark Capital, which led early rounds and sponsored the SPAC that took it public, along with Tiger Global, IAC, KKR, Fidelity, ArrowMark Partners, and Quantum Strategic Partners. ArrowMark later shifted from equity investor to lender and helped take control of the company through its bankruptcy.