leo
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Niosha Kayhani
Niosha Kayhani is Chief of Staff to the CEO at Muon Space, a Mountain View based end-to-end space systems company building LEO satellite constellations for climate, earth observation, and national security missions. A chartered mechanical engineer trained at the University of Portsmouth with an executive MBA from Warwick, he arrived in Silicon Valley after building innovation programs at Cubic in London and San Diego, a detour through Google in Dublin, and a first job tuning fiber-optic lasers at SPI. He holds ten-plus U.S. patents and, on the side, has founded Taurus Space, a company working on standards-aligned command-and-control for coalition defense networks.
Oligo Space
Oligo Space is a Hawthorne, California startup building an AI-first stack for designing and manufacturing payload-centered spacecraft. Its software engine, Zenith, turns raw mission requirements into flight-ready ESPA-class spacecraft using generative design, constraint solving and physics-based optimization - compressing work that once took teams of specialists months into a process that runs in minutes and manufactures in under eight months. Founded in 2024 by MIT AeroAstro graduate and former NASA JPL engineer Jacob Rodriguez, the company plans to fly its first spacecraft, Chimera-1, aboard SpaceX's Transporter-15 mission in 2026.
Epic Aerospace
Epic Aerospace builds Orbit Transfer Vehicles - small chemical space tugs that pick up satellites from crowded rideshare drop-offs and ferry them to their actual working orbits, from LEO to GEO and beyond. Founded in 2018 by Ignacio Belieres Montero, the company runs its engineering and manufacturing out of Argentina with a U.S. headquarters, and put its first GEO-class vehicle, CHIMERA GEO 1, into space aboard SpaceX in early 2025.
Starcloud
Starcloud is a US deep-tech company building data centers in orbit. By placing GPU clusters in space, it taps near-continuous solar power and passive radiative cooling to run AI training and inference without the land, water, grid-permitting, and energy constraints that bottleneck data centers on Earth. In November 2025 its Starcloud-1 satellite became the first spacecraft to train a large language model in orbit using an Nvidia H100 GPU; its $170M Series A in March 2026 made it the fastest unicorn in Y Combinator history.
Loft Orbital
Loft Orbital is a San Francisco-based space infrastructure company that flies customer payloads on standardized satellites - selling space access the way AWS sells compute. Customers skip the spacecraft-building part and ship hardware, software, or on-demand data tasks to orbit on Loft's YAM satellites.
Muon Space
Muon Space is a Mountain View-based end-to-end space systems company that designs, builds, and operates mission-optimized satellite constellations for climate, defense, and Earth intelligence customers. Its Halo platform pairs the modular MuSat spacecraft bus with MuOS middleware and the MuSim digital twin, anchoring high-profile programs like Google's FireSat wildfire constellation and a $44.6M U.S. Space Force environmental monitoring agreement.
Pierre-Damien Vaujour
Pierre-Damien Vaujour is the co-founder and CEO of Loft Orbital, the San Francisco-based company that turned satellite deployment from a multi-year aerospace engineering odyssey into something closer to provisioning a cloud server. A French aerospace engineer by training — ISAE-SUPAERO class of 2008, master's from University of Michigan — he cut his teeth at ESA, NASA, the Google Lunar X PRIZE, and was among the first hires at Spire Global before co-founding Loft Orbital in 2017 with Alex Greenberg and Antoine de Chassy. Under his leadership, the company reached unicorn status in January 2025 with a $170M Series C, surpassed $500M in cumulative bookings, and is now building the default AI execution layer for orbital infrastructure.
Astro Digital
Astro Digital designs, builds and operates small-satellite systems delivered as turn-key 'Mission-as-a-Service' offerings - covering spacecraft bus, payload integration, launch, ground network and mission operations - for earth observation, communications, science and in-orbit demonstration customers from LEO to GEO.
Ignacio Montero
Ignacio Belieres Montero is the founder and CEO of Epic Aerospace, a Los Altos, California-based company building orbit transfer vehicles and space tugs that move satellites from one orbit to another. A Stanford aerospace engineering graduate and Y Combinator S19 alum, he started building rockets at 16 and founded Epic Aerospace in 2017. The company's CHIMERA LEO 1 launched aboard SpaceX Transporter 6 in January 2023, and CHIMERA GEO 1 launched on SpaceX's Intuitive Machines-2 mission in February 2025, reaching 53 million kilometers from Earth. Epic Aerospace reached $4.2M in annual revenue in 2024 with a 28-person team, pioneering non-toxic hypergolic propulsion technology for cost-effective in-space transportation.