defense-and-space
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S2 Corporation
S2 Corporation is a Bozeman, Montana photonics company that reads the radio spectrum the way a hologram stores an image - all at once. Its core technology, spatial-spectral (S2) holography, uses a cooled, sugar-cube-sized crystal doped with rare-earth atoms as an optical computer that captures and processes radio frequencies across enormous instantaneous bandwidths (0.03 to 110 GHz). Packaged as the Extreme Bandwidth Analyzer and Correlator (EBAC), the technology serves electronic warfare, signals intelligence, RF spectrum monitoring, emitter geolocation, and data mining for U.S. defense and intelligence customers including DARPA and IARPA.
Bridgit Mendler
Bridgit Mendler is the co-founder and CEO of Northwood Space, an El Segundo startup mass-producing phased-array ground stations to move data between satellites and Earth. A former Disney Channel lead (Teddy Duncan on Good Luck Charlie) and platinum-selling pop singer, she pivoted through the MIT Media Lab and Harvard Law School into deep-tech, and by early 2026 had raised more than $100 million and won a $49.8M U.S. Space Force contract to modernize the Satellite Control Network.
Josiah Gruber
Josiah Gruber is the CEO of Scout Space, a Reston, Virginia company building sensors and software to detect, track and characterize objects in orbit. An optical and RF remote-sensing engineer with more than 15 years of hands-on experience, he joined Scout in 2023 as an engineer, rose to VP of Engineering and then CTO, and took the top job in late 2025. Under his leadership Scout raised an $18M Series A in May 2026 and is putting its Owl optical payload on the inaugural flight of Blue Origin's Blue Ring spacecraft.
Baiju Bhatt
Baiju Bhatt co-founded Robinhood, the zero-commission trading app that put stock buying on a phone screen and made him one of the youngest self-made billionaires in the US. In 2024 he walked away from finance to chase the idea he grew up with: power and machines in orbit. His company, founded as Aetherflux and rebranded in 2026 as Cowboy Space Corporation, started by trying to beam solar energy to Earth with infrared lasers and has since aimed higher - building rockets and AI data centers that live in low Earth orbit. The son of a NASA scientist, Bhatt is a physicist and self-taught product designer who keeps picking old, stubborn problems and bringing capitalism to them.
Varda Space Industries
Varda Space Industries builds spacecraft that manufacture materials in microgravity and bring them back to Earth inside autonomous reentry capsules. The El Segundo company is best known for crystallizing pharmaceuticals in orbit - it grew crystals of the HIV drug ritonavir on its first mission - and for selling its capsules as hypersonic test platforms to the U.S. government. With its W-series vehicles, Varda is trying to turn low Earth orbit into a working factory floor and a routine, high-cadence delivery service back to the planet's surface.
Northwood Space
Northwood Space is an El Segundo, California company building the ground side of the space economy: rapidly manufactured, software-defined phased-array ground stations that pull data down from satellites. Its flagship product, Portal, electronically steers beams to track many satellites at once instead of mechanically pointing a single dish, which the company argues removes the bottleneck choking modern satellite constellations. Founded in 2023 by CEO Bridgit Mendler, CTO Griffin Cleverly, and head of software Shaurya Luthra, Northwood has raised $136.4M total, including a $100M Series B in January 2026, and holds a $49.8M U.S. Space Force contract to modernize the Satellite Control Network.
Scout Space
Scout Space is a Reston, Virginia defense and space company building the sensing layer for orbit. It develops electro-optical and infrared sensors (Owl and Sparrow), onboard autonomy software co-developed with the U.S. Space Force, and edge-processing and mission-design platforms that let spacecraft detect, track, and characterize objects in orbit - even without ground contact. Scout's pitch: a proliferated network of in-space sensors is fundamental to operating safely in an increasingly crowded and contested orbital environment.