Announcing our investment in Epsilon3
Today our newest portfolio company, Epsilon3, announced their $1m seed round. Stage Venture Partners was proud to be the largest investor in the round, alongside a strong group of venture capital firms and angel investors.
Epsilon3 builds mission management software to accelerate humanity’s push into space. When you think of a rocket launch, a satellite deployment, or a NASA mission to an unexplored part of the solar system, you imagine mission control. Rows of engineers sit in front of their consoles, often with a wall sized display in front of them. At the moment of launch, or of touchdown, the entire place erupts to the sound of applause, high fives, and champagne bottles popping.
With the drama of the launch, and the celebration of every success, few people outside of the space industry think about the software that makes it possible. If you’ve ever asked what was on screen in front of those engineers on the day of launch, and in the thousands of days leading up to any launch, you probably assumed that the space industry was built on the most modern, specialized software imaginable.
We thought so too, before meeting Epsilon3. And then we learned that, as in so many other fields, the reality is that rocket scientists make do with Excel and PDFs. For the most important job of the space industry — defining and tracking operating procedures — they rely on manual, error-prone, and hard to track solutions. There are a handful of open source tools available, and a handful of legacy software packages from aerospace companies. But no modern, fully featured workflow solution has broken through to enable rocket scientists to have the same sort of communication, collaboration, and working environment that software engineers have had for years.
No solution exists because space is hard. It is rocket science, after all. Only a uniquely qualified team could have the credibility, first to build software for this industry, and then to have customers trust their missions, costing hundreds of millions of dollars each, to a new company. Luckily, we have found that team in Epsilon3.
Laura Crabtree, the CEO, worked for over a decade at SpaceX, and for five years at Northrop Grumman before that. At SpaceX, she was involved in many aspects of Falcon 9 and Dragon design, including F9 recovery, Dragon recovery, flight training, software testing, CONOPs development, and simulator design. She was on console for both the first Dragon mission and the first mission to the International Space Station. Most importantly, she was a Crew Operations and Resource Engineer (CORE), who helped put the United States back in the business of human spaceflight. As the lead trainer for the Crew Demo-2 mission, she worked closely with astronauts Bob and Doug, before and during their historic mission.
Max Mednik, the COO, is a software engineer and serial entrepreneur who has co-founded four startups. His prior company, Epirus, develops directed energy systems to protect against unmanned aerial vehicles. With two engineering degrees from Stanford, an MBA from UCLA, and time spent at Google working on Chrome OS and core machine learning research, he combines strong engineering experience with the perspective of leadership from startups to trillion dollar companies. Like Max, co-founder Aaron Sullivan also brings an academic background from Stanford, a stint at Google, and experience as a serial founder.
We believe that the space industry is poised at an inflection point. Catalyzed by SpaceX and the Falcon 9, the cost of launching a kilogram of payload into low Earth orbit (LEO) has fallen from $65,000 on the space shuttle, to just $2600 on the Falcon 9. The cost curve is about to experience another price shock, driven by the new Starship platform under development in Texas. Reading between the lines of Elon Musk’s twitter feed, smart analysts have estimated that Starship could lower the cost per kilogram to LEO from $2600 to just $10. Even $100/kg would change the world.
While SpaceX has advanced the space industry with only limited competition over the last decade, they’ll have plenty of company in the twenties. While researching Epsilon3, we identified two dozen new launch companies that have either completed their first launch recently, or that have their first launch scheduled in the next two years. Whether you want to book a ride to space on Rocket Lab, Relativity, Astra, Firefly, or others, soon you’ll have your choice of provider whenever you want to fly above the friendly skies of Earth.
When the price of a resource changes, the way we use it changes as well. When space was expensive, it was the domain of cold war contests, the communications industry, and scientists. Now that space is cheap today, and really cheap in just a few years, it will be everyone’s domain. Every country and every major research university will have a space program. They will be joined by tens of thousands of companies, and even a few hundred high schools. We do not need to know what they will do with the new access to space, just as we did not need to know all the programs that would be built on iOS after the iPhone’s launch.
We can, however, clearly see the space rush of the 2020s as it develops on the launchpad, countdown clock ticking. At Epsilon3, Laura, Max, Aaron and their team are building the software to make it happen for each of these thousands of spacefaring customers.