Ignacio
Montero

The Story

Satellites arrive. Then what?

Rockets get satellites to orbit. Ignacio Montero builds what happens next. A SpaceX Falcon 9 drops your satellite somewhere between 200 and 600 kilometers above Earth. You wanted it at 36,000 kilometers in geostationary orbit, or parked in a specific slot in a constellation. The gap between where you land and where you need to be - that's the business. That's Epic Aerospace.

Montero founded Epic Aerospace in September 2017, a year after graduating from Stanford with a degree in aerospace engineering, and about ten years after building his first amateur rocket in Argentina. The company makes orbit transfer vehicles - spacecraft that pick up satellites post-launch and carry them to their final destination. In the logistics analogy he favors, Epic Aerospace is last-mile delivery for space.

The first vehicle, CHIMERA LEO 1, flew aboard SpaceX Transporter 6 in January 2023 - built in roughly one year from concept to launch. The second, CHIMERA GEO 1, launched on SpaceX's Intuitive Machines-2 mission in February 2025 and executed a lunar fly-by trajectory. As of early 2025, it was traveling 53 million kilometers from Earth - considerably further than planned, in a way that produced more data than a quiet mission would have.

The technical edge is propulsion. Most orbit transfer vehicles use conventional hypergolic propellants - chemicals that ignite on contact, efficient but toxic and difficult to handle. Epic Aerospace developed its own non-toxic hypergolic system using highly concentrated hydrogen peroxide, producing the same performance profile without the handling hazard. The company has run more than 300 engine tests on this propulsion technology, enough to characterize its behavior across the operating envelope that LEO-to-GEO missions actually demand.

By December 2024, Epic Aerospace had 28 employees and $4.2 million in annual revenue, doubling from $2.1 million six months earlier. The team builds everything in-house: propulsion, avionics, spacecraft structure, and the software stack for mission operations. Montero raised a $150,000 pre-seed from Y Combinator in 2019 and a follow-on $1.1 million shortly after, then a seed round in January 2021. The company is based in Los Altos, California.

Montero is Argentine, grew up in Buenos Aires, and speaks four languages - Spanish and English natively, professional German, and limited French. The multilingual background reflects a founder who positioned himself globally from the beginning, studying at Stanford and building a company in Silicon Valley while maintaining connections to Argentina's engineering talent base.

GomSpace, the Danish satellite technology company, signed a €318,000 order with Epic Aerospace in September 2023 for control systems and subsystems - a procurement signal from the established satellite industry that Epic's orbit transfer vehicles are moving from demonstration to commercial operation.