The Startup Turning Space Into a Logistics Network

**Alex Wilhelm** (0:00)
Hello, and welcome back to Twist. My name is Alex. Now, space companies are all over the news. SpaceX has filed to go public, bringing the world's leading space launch and connectivity company to the public markets at last. Blue Origin is in the news for accidentally exploding a heavy launch rocket on its pad, while SpaceX recently had a big success with its Starship craft. Rocket Lab today is worth $67 billion. It's a busy time in the market for getting mass from Earth to space. But what about the same mass once it reaches its initial orbit? What if you need to move a piece of space gear somewhere else? Well, you're probably going to need a new set of tools, a new set of spacecraft, even engines for that work. And that's what Impulse Space is working on. The company just closed a massive $500 million funding round, a Series D, that brings its total capital raised over the $1 billion mark. To help us understand Impulse Space's technology, its market, and why its latest Helios craft could put a higher orbit and even the moon into the palm of our hands, please join me in welcoming to the show Tom Mueller, CEO and CTO of Impulse Space. This Week in Startups is brought to you by Northwest Registered Agent. Get more when you start your business with Northwest. In 10 clicks in 10 minutes, you can form your company and walk away with a real business identity. Learn more at northwestregisteredagent.com/twist.
Every, for all your incorporation, banking, benefits, accounting, taxes, or other back office administration needs, visit every.io.
And Sentry. Your team should be focused on shipping features, not chasing down bugs. New users can get $240 in free credits when they go to sentry.io/twist and use the code TWIST. Tom, how are you doing?

**Tom Mueller** (1:39)
Great. Great to be here, Alex.

**Alex Wilhelm** (1:40)
I'm so excited that space companies are raising enormous amounts of money. It seemed for a long time like it was going to be three AI companies and literally no one else. So before we get into technology, let's talk about the route itself. How hard was it to raise? Did you get all the money you wanted? And how long did it take?

**Tom Mueller** (1:55)
Yeah, well, fortunately for us, we've had a pretty good time, pretty good experience raising money. We were oversubscribed on all of our rounds, even since the C round. This one also, insiders really wanted to go, we could have waited to raise, but as you said, the market's really hot right now. So why not do it now?
We kept upping the size of the round to let in new investors and fulfill our current investors, so it went great.

**Alex Wilhelm** (2:28)
Just read between the lines there, it sounds like Impulse is absolutely not capital constrained at this point in time.

**Tom Mueller** (2:35)
That would be true, yeah.

**Alex Wilhelm** (2:37)
Would that perhaps be an understatement based on your reaction to my comment?

**Tom Mueller** (2:40)
Possibly.

**Alex Wilhelm** (2:42)
Well, I mean, it's not a bad place to be. You're working on some pretty hard stuff and I don't mean to be negative about any company's struggles, Blue Origin, but sometimes things don't go right in space and that's difficult. It's harder to fix something in orbit than it is on a server in Redmond. So it makes a lot of sense.

**Tom Mueller** (2:58)
Okay.

**Alex Wilhelm** (2:59)
Now, I think people have probably heard of Impulse Space, but I don't think they have a really deep understanding of what you're building. So let's talk through a couple of your major products and then get into why they matter. Tell me about Mira and what it's for, and then we'll get into Helios right after that.

**Tom Mueller** (3:14)
So Mira is our highly propulsive spacecraft that can do precision maneuvering, and it has storable propellants, not cryogenic propellants, so it can stay on orbit for years. It does very fine pointing, it can host payloads, which means they stay on board and we take them around in the youth experiments which we have going on right now actually, or it can deploy payloads like all three of our spacecraft that have gone up so far have all deployed CubeSats.
It can do rendezvous and proximity ops we call RPO, which means it can go up to another spacecraft. We did that last year between two of our spacecraft. It got within 1,200 meters of each other.

**Alex Wilhelm** (3:52)
Wasn't that with Starfish Space?

**Tom Mueller** (3:54)
Starfish was the kit on board and they were commanding us to rendezvous up with our other spacecraft. So it's really cool.