Tagged: spacex
18 results
Climbing the Kardashev Scale: SpaceX AI Satellites and the Terafab
In a SpaceX studio sit-down at the company's Bastrop, Texas facility, Elon Musk and Starlink engineer Ian join a host to connect the dots between Starship, Starlink solar technology, and a bold plan to put AI compute in orbit. Musk frames the effort using the Kardashev scale, arguing that humanity currently harnesses less than a trillionth of the sun's power and must move to space to ascend it. The team outlines three limiting factors to solve at scale, mass to orbit, solar power, and chips, and unveils a draft design for a SpaceX AI satellite delivering roughly 150 kW peak power. The conversation escalates from launching thousands of orbital compute satellites to building a 100-million-square-foot 'terafab' chip factory, and ultimately to lunar mass drivers that could fling AI satellites into deep space, scaling civilization's energy harvest toward a terawatt per year and beyond.
Matt Soule
Matt Soule is the founder and CEO of Parallel Systems, a Los Angeles company building autonomous, battery-electric railcars that move freight in small, self-propelled platoons instead of behind diesel locomotives. A former SpaceX avionics leader who once ran a 300-person department, Soule started Parallel in 2020 to pull short-haul freight off congested highways and onto underused rail. The company has raised more than $91 million, secured a Federal Railroad Administration pilot near the Port of Savannah, and aims to convert a slice of the $700 billion U.S. trucking market to cleaner rail.
Laurence Allen
Laurence Allen, co-founder and CEO of Terranova, explains how his startup lifts land out of flood zones by injecting slurries of waste wood chips deep underground, an inexpensive, scalable alternative to seawalls, levees, and demolition. Drawing on a 1970s Venice mudjacking experiment and powered by autonomous robots and AI geology modeling, Terranova aims to be 'the anti-subsidence,' protecting whole communities and critical infrastructure. Allen also reflects on his formative internship at SpaceX, his maker upbringing, the intensity of deep-tech founding, and his vision for licensing the technology to contractors worldwide.
Will Bruey
Will Bruey is the co-founder and CEO of Varda Space Industries, a company building autonomous capsules that manufacture pharmaceuticals in orbit and then fly them back to Earth. A former SpaceX avionics engineer who flew Dragon on eight missions to the International Space Station, Bruey now runs the first company to manufacture a drug in space and successfully return it. His pitch is deliberately unglamorous: make space manufacturing routine enough to be boring, then build the supply chain that follows.
Michelle Lee
Michelle Lee is the founder and CEO of Medra, a San Francisco company building 'Physical AI Scientists' - robot arms with cameras and sensors, governed by AI, that run wet-lab biology experiments around the clock. A Stanford AI Lab PhD who worked at NVIDIA, SpaceX, and McKinsey, she walked away from an assistant professor post at NYU after AlphaFold 2's 2021 release convinced her that biology's real bottleneck was not algorithms but data, and that data is a robotics problem. Medra runs in production with partners including Genentech and raised a $52M Series A in December 2025, bringing total funding to roughly $63M.
Nicholas Callegari
Nicholas Callegari is the founder, chief engineer, and CEO of Verustruct, a New Haven climate-tech startup building gantry-less 3D printing robots that print entire load-bearing walls - plumbing, wiring, and insulation included. A former SpaceX structures engineer who helped design the Polaris Dawn spacewalk hardware on the Dragon spacecraft, he traded orbit for the housing crisis, betting that the same first-principles engineering used for spacecraft can cut home construction costs in half. He is a 2026 Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree in Manufacturing & Industry and a Yale School of Management MBA.
Sara Drakeley
Sara Drakeley is the CEO of Sentz (formerly MobileCoin), a privacy-focused stablecoin and global payments company based in Sacramento, California. An MIT-trained mathematician and computer scientist, she built animation pipelines at Walt Disney Animation Studios - the trees in Frozen, the water in Moana, the fur in Zootopia - then wrote trading infrastructure on Wall Street and joined SpaceX's simulation team before becoming the third engineering hire at MobileCoin in 2018. She rose from principal engineer to CTO to CEO, and now leads the company's push to make instant, low-cost, private cross-border payments accessible worldwide.
Doug Tallmadge
Doug Tallmadge is the co-founder and CEO of Gradial, a Seattle enterprise-AI company building agentic tools that automate the unglamorous middle of marketing - the approvals, tagging, compliance checks, and publishing that sit between a finished idea and a live campaign. Before Gradial, he spent nearly five years at SpaceX as a software engineering manager, where he helped scale the Starlink network from zero to more than 500,000 customers. A Dartmouth physics graduate who also passed through Lockheed Martin and Bridgewater Associates, he started Gradial in 2023 with three Dartmouth classmates and has since raised roughly $53M across seed, Series A, and a $35M Series B led by VMG Partners.
Sergiy Nesterenko
Sergiy Nesterenko is the founder and CEO of Quilter, a Los Angeles company building AI that designs printed circuit boards on its own. A former SpaceX avionics engineer who spent five years on Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy electronics, he watched one of his first boards literally burn up in his hands and decided manual PCB layout was a problem worth a decade. Quilter trains its system on physics and constraints rather than copying human designers, and in 2025 it produced the world's first fully functional computer laid out by AI.
Skyler Fernandes
J. Skyler (Sky) Fernandes is the Founder and General Partner of VU Venture Partners, a global venture capital fund spanning San Francisco, Hong Kong, Munich, and São Paulo, and the Co-Founder & CEO of Venture University, widely considered the world's leading investor accelerator. A Powerlist 100 VC, Fernandes has assembled a portfolio of 150+ investments including early positions in SpaceX, OpenAI, Meta (Facebook), Uber, Palantir, and Neuralink - with 25+ unicorns and 20+ multi-billion dollar exits. Before VU, he founded Simon Venture Group, the VC arm of Simon Property Group (S&P 100), which CB Insights ranked a top 5 retail investor alongside GV, Intel Capital, and Comcast Ventures. He graduated summa cum laude from NYU and studied Physics and Foreign Policy at Harvard. Beyond capital, Fernandes gave the first TED Talk on venture capital, created the #1 Startup Pitch Deck template (700,000+ views), and co-created 'The Next Big Thing' board game on entrepreneurship with his wife Jenna.
Levi Malott
Levi Malott is a Missouri-native software engineer turned startup operator and venture capitalist who tested Falcon 9 rocket systems at SpaceX, built ML infrastructure at BetterUp, scaled Pachama's engineering team from 7 to 40 people as VP of Engineering through a $700M valuation, then co-founded Weave Bio as CTO - an AI platform accelerating pharmaceutical regulatory filings that raised a $10M seed round in 2023. Today he serves as Venture Partner at Redbud VC in Columbia, Missouri, backing early-stage tech founders from the heartland.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk is the wealthiest person in recorded history and the founder or co-founder of nine major companies including SpaceX, Tesla, xAI, and Neuralink. Born in Pretoria, South Africa, he taught himself to code at 10, sold his first game at 12, and dropped out of a Stanford PhD after two days to chase the internet gold rush. His companies collectively own 65% of all operational Earth satellites, produce the world's best-selling electric vehicles, and are actively building brain-computer interfaces and rockets to colonize Mars. As of May 2026, his net worth stands at approximately $809 billion.
Brian Singerman
Brian Singerman spent 16 years as a General Partner at Founders Fund - Peter Thiel's celebrated contrarian VC firm - backing SpaceX, Anduril, OpenAI, Stripe, and Scale AI before the world knew what they would become. He founded iGoogle at Google in 2005, built one of the first YC-focused investment vehicles (XGYC), and developed a reputation as one of the most conviction-driven investors of his generation. In late 2024, he transitioned to Partner Emeritus at Founders Fund, then co-founded GPx - a $500M debut fund with a structural twist on the VC model - with Lee Linden, backed significantly by Peter Thiel.
David George
David George is a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), where he leads the firm's Growth investing practice - a $15 billion operation he built from scratch after joining in 2019. A former General Atlantic investor who backed Airbnb, Slack, CrowdStrike, and Uber at growth stage, George brings a ruthlessly analytical, 'business model snob' approach to late-stage venture. He has since backed Roblox, Databricks, SpaceX, Stripe, Figma, OpenAI, and Anduril, developing distinctive frameworks around 'what vs. how' innovations, push vs. pull market dynamics, and winner-take-all market structures. A Kentucky native with a wrestling background, a Notre Dame summa cum laude degree, and an MBA from Stanford GSB, George is known for his competitive intensity, deep intellectual frameworks, and a Post-it note on his computer that reads: 'Is the market demanding more of my product?'
Luke Nosek
Luke Nosek is a Polish-American entrepreneur and venture capitalist who co-founded PayPal, where he served as VP of Marketing and Strategy. He later co-founded Founders Fund with Peter Thiel and Ken Howery, before launching Gigafund in 2017, a venture firm focused on transformative technologies. As the first institutional investor in SpaceX and board member since 2008, Nosek has championed ambitious, decades-long investments in space exploration, AI, and frontier technologies, embodying a contrarian approach to venture capital that prioritizes world-changing impact over short-term returns.
Shaun Maguire
Shaun Maguire is a partner at Sequoia Capital who bridges the worlds of theoretical physics and venture capital. With a PhD in quantum gravity from Caltech under John Preskill, he co-founded the cybersecurity company Expanse (acquired by Palo Alto Networks for over $1 billion) while completing his doctorate. At Sequoia, he leads investments in deep tech, aerospace, defense, and AI, backing companies like SpaceX, xAI, The Boring Company, and Neuralink. Before Sequoia, he was a partner at Google Ventures, where he led investments in Stripe, IonQ, and Opendoor. His unique background combines rigorous theoretical physics research on multiboundary wormholes with a track record of building and backing billion-dollar companies at the frontier of technology.
Steve Jurvetson
Steve Jurvetson is a legendary Silicon Valley venture capitalist and co-founder of Future Ventures, best known for coining the term 'viral marketing,' backing Hotmail, SpaceX, and Tesla from their earliest days, and bringing a scientist's obsession to everything from model rockets to nanotechnology. After two decades at Draper Fisher Jurvetson managing over $6 billion, he launched Future Ventures in 2018 with a patient, 15-year fund structure focused on deep tech, AI, space, and synthetic biology. A triple Stanford alumnus who finished his EE degree in 2.5 years at the top of his class, Jurvetson is as likely to be found photographing rocket launches on his Flickr account as sitting on SpaceX's board.
Scott Banister
Scott Banister is a serial entrepreneur and prolific angel investor who co-founded IronPort Systems (acquired by Cisco for $830M), was the first outside investor in PayPal, and is credited by insiders with conceiving the paid keyword search advertising model that spawned the entire Google AdWords ecosystem. With 100+ investments spanning Uber, SpaceX, DeepMind, Facebook, and Affirm - most at seed stage - he is one of the most consequential yet least-known members of the PayPal Mafia.