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.

Jacob Rodriguez is the founder and CEO of Oligo Space, a Hawthorne, California aerospace startup automating the design and manufacturing of large multi-orbit satellites. A first-generation college student who won a full scholarship to MIT and interned at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, he left school early as a 2024 Thiel Fellow to build a manufacturing-in-the-loop foundation model for spacecraft production. Oligo plans to fly its first satellite, Chimera-1, on SpaceX's Transporter-15 mission in 2026.
True Anomaly is a Colorado-based space defense company building the hardware and software to operate, defend, and win in contested orbit. Its flagship Jackal autonomous orbital vehicle - a highly maneuverable, refrigerator-sized spacecraft - is paired with Mosaic, a full-stack mission autonomy and command-and-control platform. Founded in 2022 by Air Force and Space Force veterans, the company sells primarily to the U.S. Space Force and Department of the Air Force, has raised more than $1 billion across four rounds, and is valued at $2.2 billion after its April 2026 Series D.
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.
Frédérique Dame is a General Partner at GV (Google Ventures), where she leads investments in consumer technology, life sciences, and AI. A French immigrant who moved to Silicon Valley at 24, she built her career as a product and engineering leader at Yahoo!, Photobucket, SmugMug, and Uber — where she helped scale the company from 80 employees to 7,000+ across 68 countries. At GV she co-leads the Women's Health investment team and has backed companies including Midi Health, Found, Allara, Oula Health, and TMRW. She serves on the board of Les Mills International and previously on Ubisoft's board, and was named to Rock Health's Top 50 in Digital Health.