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Apex Space, a startup aiming to revolutionize satellite bus manufacturing, went public Monday with a $7.5 million seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz.
The Los Angeles-based company is focusing on the satellite bus — the part of the spacecraft that handles the payload — as a “new bottleneck” hitting the space industry. Apex’s two co-founders, Ian Cinnamon and Maximilian Benassi, said in a blog post that they independently observed the major changes in the industry that convinced them of the need for a new satellite bus manufacturing solution.
In 2020, Synapse Technology, the founder of the Palantir-acquired tech startup, Sinnamon, said it has seen payload customers “re-engaged” in the long and expensive process of building custom satellite buses. Benassi, an engineer with six years at SpaceX and nearly a year and a half at Astra, has seen changes to begin with the economics of mass production rather than the engineering process that has characterized satellite buses until now. More sensible.
“If we look at this transformative change, we need to think differently about spaceships and start adapting to the new market conditions,” he said. “We can’t build a space shuttle. We have to produce in quantity.
This approach, which Cinnamon described in an interview with TechCrunch as scalable and product-led, is a big departure from traditional satellite bus manufacturing. Apex aims to deliver satellite buses to customers in a matter of months, rather than an interim scenario of a few years.
Apex is also coming to market with a small satellite bus called Aries that can carry loads of up to 94 kg. That platform would be ideal for low-Earth missions; According to the startup on its website, future products will be compatible with other missions, for example with geosynchronous orbit. Apex offers extras like insurance and flight booking. Cinnamon said the company plans to deliver the first Aris platform in 2023, followed by 5 in 2024, and will continue to scale from there.
The two co-founders credit the launch sector with the likes of Astra and RocketLab, which are competing companies that each design satellite buses as part of a full-stop solution for customers. Other major players in the satellite bus manufacturing space include Terran Orbital, which last year announced plans to build a 660,000-square-foot satellite manufacturing plant in Florida, and York Space Systems, which was valued at $1.12 billion after selling a majority stake to Firefly. Aerospace Owner AE Industrial Partners. But Cinnamon Apex says it will differentiate itself from these players in several ways: The first is that the startup’s “bread and butter” will be business customers, not government customers. He added that he is planning to produce for months to satisfy the demand from the business sector.
The call for large-scale manufacturing is clearly led by general partner Kathryn Boyle of Andreessen Horowitz, who launched a new fund called “American Dynamism” earlier this year. The fund aims to invest in companies that strengthen the nation’s interests and address challenges in industries such as supply chain, aerospace and manufacturing (among others). As Boyle argued in her Investment thesis“The only fastest way to start American renewal is by building initiatives for critical problems.” For the Apex co-founders, solving the satellite bus manufacturing problem is not critical to the space industry today. It is key to making humans a multi-planetary species in the future.
If we really think about the future, we think that all the other spacecraft out there, moving around goods and services, taking pictures of Mars and the Moon, providing communications services, etc., etc. Are all these spacecraft going to be built by hand just once, like today? Or are they actually going to be mass produced? And I believe that to enable that future, they need to be produced at scale and we want to be the first company to really ramp up the production of these vehicles.
In addition to A6Z, the round also saw participation from XYZ Venture Capital, J2 Ventures, Lux Capital and Village Global. The number one priority for the new funding is hiring, Cinnamon said. The company is looking for people from outside the traditional aerospace and space sector. The company will use the increase to continue developing the Aries platform, which will begin ordering parts and assembling the production line.
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