From SpaceX to $1B in 15 Months: Scott Morton’s Revel Story

**Scott Morton** (0:00)
Aerospace, automotive, aviation, small modular reactor companies, chemical processing, anything where complex hardware systems are being developed. I think there's actually kind of a brain drain in this space. Like, all these solutions were developed in the 80s and 90s, and all the software engineers in the world got very excited about. The internet is just like ancient tools. What if there was a company that could go and build something that was like three decades newer? At SpaceX, we ended up actually having to build all the infrastructure from scratch, you know, sitting on console. Countdown clock is ticking down. If the software is evolving like that, that is a problem.

**Molly O'Shea** (0:40)
Scott Morton, welcome to Sourcery.

**Scott Morton** (0:42)
Thank you, glad to be here.

**Molly O'Shea** (0:43)
Well, I think we have a big congratulations to give you today. You recently just raised $150 million at a $1 billion and $5 million valuation.

**Scott Morton** (0:55)
Yes, yeah, raised, in this round, $150 million, total raised $180, a 15-month-old company.

**Molly O'Shea** (1:03)
15 months?

**Scott Morton** (1:04)
Yes.

**Molly O'Shea** (1:04)
That's it.

**Scott Morton** (1:05)
Yep, it's been, yeah, full afterburners, full, yeah, for the past year and a half.

**Molly O'Shea** (1:12)
Who led it and what was the process like? You've only been around for 15 months. That's very fast.

**Scott Morton** (1:17)
So yeah, this is Index Ventures leading this round. They came knocking and I got to know them the course of a few weeks. They came and actually saw a demo and love what they saw. I think overall, at least my philosophy on fundraising is, we really want to have just a very high conviction team behind us. And I also just don't want to span this out over 10 years. I want to go full maximum speed to execute on our vision. Having high conviction, I think means coming out and putting your name on the line. And that's what I think a preemptive round looks like on the investor side. So instead of doing a full process and you create this competitive atmosphere where you might not actually get the highest conviction investor, I think I like this form of fundraising.

**Molly O'Shea** (2:06)
And then who did The Seed and the Series A?

**Scott Morton** (2:09)
Yeah, so The Seed was, I would say, kind of a haphazard fundraise, to be honest with you. It was like I had, you know, left SpaceX and had actually just gotten married. And then I kicked off a fundraise. Yeah, Felicis and Abstract co-led that one. And then it was May Thrive came in for a preemptive Series A. And and then this one was, it was actually Index led. Redpoint is also has a big participation in this one. Alex Bard at Redpoint.

**Molly O'Shea** (2:42)
That's phenomenal. I hope you know that. It's pretty incredible to be 15 months old. You were at SpaceX for nine years. Can you just talk more, go deeper into how this all started? And before we get too deep, obviously I think the fundraising activity is super, super exciting, but we didn't talk about what Revel is. So could you explain what Revel is and how you started this?

**Scott Morton** (3:04)
So just real quick, Revel is a platform for controlling and testing hardware systems. And I think kind of going way back, I grew up building machines with my dad in the garage. Could never actually kind of write the or make them do anything. Fast forward into college, I worked at a research lab in robotics. And then kind of similar story, I could like, I could design the whole the robot, I could even fabricate, I could machine it. But then I could not actually write the control software to go make it do what I wanted to do. So I ended up getting a, you know, getting a computer science master's, I was a mechanical undergrad. And then later at SpaceX, it was really interesting. It was essentially the same problem at a much larger scale. We needed to write a lot of control software for the launch site for the rocket as well.
And there were all these kind of solutions that had been developed over the 80s, 80s and 90s. And that were some of them were in use at SpaceX, but they were, you know, three decades old at this point. And overall, it's just like this space is just seeing there's like, I think there's actually kind of a brain drain in this space. Like all these solutions were developed in the 80s and 90s. And then I think all the software engineers in the world got very excited about like the internet and worked on those problems. And this kind of area kind of just fell by the wayside. And so at SpaceX, we ended up actually having to build all the infrastructure from scratch, to actually have something that was modern and that also would really help us be more successful. Big companies that have been worked that material, like kind of came together in the 80s and 90s, like LabVIEW or National Instruments is one of the big ones. They actually built a kind of graphical programming language back in 1986 And that's kind of the primary way that you would use their platform to write control software. And then the other big space, that's kind of an hardware test. The other big market is industrial control systems. And it's actually this, it's like a very similar story. The kind of most modern tools were developed in, it's a language called Structured Text, invented in 1993 And that is still to this day, like the cutting edge in that space. And so these two big markets have kind of evolved totally separately with very different solutions. It's all actually fundamentally the same problem. It's just how does software control physical systems?