Why Impulse Raised $500M to Move Things in Space | President & COO Eric Romo

**Molly O'Shea** (0:00)
You've just raised a massive Series D. This was a $500 million round. This brings your total funding to over $1.025 billion.

**Eric Romo** (0:07)
Yeah, a little over a billion dollars. That just means the bar just got higher for us. This funding will allow us to be just a little bit more forward leaning, to have the freedom to execute. We've got our Mira product line, which is now scaling to where we have to build one of those per month. If they had an option to go directly, and it was economical, they would take it. So Helios gets them to their same place they want to go, the same day they'll launch, eight hours later. The middle of that distribution of the tens of millions of dollars of value for a single flight of Helios, trying to launch this XYZ thing, it's headed towards GEO. The reality is, from the ground, you don't know what that thing is. Does it have robot arms? Does it have machine guns? We don't know. The way that you figure out is you actually have to get quite close to it. All of a sudden, the defense market unlocked for us, and that's why you've seen us get a lot of traction in that market.

**Molly O'Shea** (0:58)
Eric Romo, welcome to Sourcery.

**Eric Romo** (1:00)
Thank you for having me.

**Molly O'Shea** (1:01)
Thanks for having us here. So where are we today?

**Eric Romo** (1:03)
We are in Impulse Space, the site course in Winano Beach. You're in particular on the manufacturing floor right now.
So I think you're gonna take a walk around later and get shown around by the one and only Tom Mueller, the manufacturer's floor. But we're here on Minhan Beach Boulevard. We've got a few buildings here, but you're gonna see the dense and intense portion of our factory.

**Molly O'Shea** (1:23)
I wanna get into what's sitting behind us right now, because this is very cool.
But before we do that, huge congratulations. You've just raised a massive Series D. So what happened?

**Eric Romo** (1:34)
Yeah, so what happened is that it turns out space is pretty interesting to investors right now.
You know, we started out a few years ago, Tom started the company five years ago, really focusing on Tom's excellence in propulsion and then figuring out where can we build a real business around that? Where can we build high-performance space vehicles that move things around quickly or far away? And I think as the company's grown up, we've realized where that really has a lot of traction. And there's a good bit of need for that in a commercial space with our product Helios, which I think we'll see later.
And then in defense with our product Mira, and then we hope to have a business around NASA. And really in the last couple of years, all of those business segments have taken off really quickly. We had a number of investors that have been following the company pretty closely through that time. And when they saw sort of the hockey stick start, they thought, okay, now it's the time to go ahead and do a round. In particular, we had the firms that led the round are 137 Ventures and Banner Vc. 137 has known us for a while. They're a relatively small shareholder before this round. And I decided this was the right time to step up. Pretty interesting timing for them because, as I like to joke to them and to other board members, they're not exactly a household name yet, but they're kind of about to be. They're a very large SpaceX shareholder. I've been investing in that company for a long time and are about to deliver an amazing return to all of their investors. I think it's going to get a lot of news for them. I think they just actually, just a few weeks ago, raised another $700 million of new funds as well. In addition to SpaceX, they're a couple of big Andrel shareholders and Breck shareholders.
They're a firm that's been maybe a little bit below the radar for the last few years, but I think they're now coming out. It was exciting to see them essentially decide that we were the next big ones in space. That's a real big engorgement coming from somebody who owns more than 1 percent of SpaceX.
Then Banner is a new firm, but we've known the GP there for a while as investor that is prior fund as a shareholder in Impulse. Again, both of them are tracking the company and watching that growth really start and saying, okay, now is the time to write bigger and bigger checks. Then very fortunately, that happened pretty quickly after we decided we wanted to raise around and what happened from there is that usually in this process like my first call after the term sheet is to go out to Insiders and say, what do you want to do in this round? It's starting to come together, there's an evaluation, et cetera, and then see how much of the round they might take up versus we want to fill from outsiders and we're just massively oversubscribed just from insiders. Good problem to have. And so that came together really quickly as well. So it's a good sized round, but it's one of the quicker ones I think I've ever done just because there was so much interest in the company.