Apex: Revolutionizing the Space Economy with the Fastest Delivery of Transparently Priced and Reliable Spacecraft Platforms
We first met Ian Cinnamon back in 2016 when we invested in his first venture, Synapse, which was acquired by our good friends at Palantir. After years of building for the public sector, Ian and his cofounder Max Benassi came to us in the fall of 2022 with a new idea: Apex, a company that would accelerate space deployment by making satellite buses as easy to purchase as a Macbook. Together, this power duo began to tackle a growing problem facing the space industry: the pattern of gridlock caused by skyrocketing demand, costs, and deployment timelines for satellites.
Apex is solving this bottleneck by building spacecraft platforms for this growing industry. Spacecraft consists of a payload (the thing you are launching into space) and a bus (the set of components that let the payload survive in space). Buses provide the propulsion, power, coordination, and communications for the payload, and are responsible for carrying the payload from Earth to space during a rocket launch. Apex’s satellite buses are standard platforms with payloads ranging from 100kg to 500kg, configurable to your mission needs. Their Aries platform, carrying payloads up to 100kg, is already being manufactured with a manifested launch on SpaceX’s Transporter 10 in Q1 2024. For space manufacturing, this is an unprecedented timeline for deployment.
What we find most compelling about Apex is their push for bus standardization. There is incredible power and responsibility in being a first mover to establish standardization within a market. To be a first mover, you need to predict what the marketplace will need functionally and what the product side will demand. Apex is not single spec’ing and custom building each bus; instead, they are pioneering base satellite models that are easily configurable. Their core principles are “standardization, production at scale, and rapid delivery” to deliver buses faster than the current industry standard. Ultimately, with standardization, they are moving the needle for bus manufacturing on several factors: from bespoke to reliable, unique to configurable, and opaque pricing to transparent. We need this level of standardization in our space industry manufacturing if we are to keep up with the space race of satellite demand.
Ian and Max have assembled a world-class team, and their combined time at Synapse, Palantir, SpaceX, and Astra primed them to tackle this dual-use public sector space. When we first took industry calls for diligence, to our delight, every person we connected with had already been interviewed for customer diligence by Ian and Max to understand the pain points with satellite bus manufacturing and deployment. They choose the best partners to work with and have consistently over-delivered on expectations across technological development, quality of customers, and speed of delivery to unlock their next round of capital successfully.
XYZ participated in Apex’s Seed Round last year, and just a few months later, we are excited to continue the partnership in their $16M Series A Round led by our close friend Katherine Boyle at a16z, and Shield Capital, which brings their total funding to over $27M.
Check out opportunities to join the team here.
