And you talked last time, but what was the key unlock? Is it a technology milestone, financial milestone? What really unlocked this particular fundraise?

I mean, we're asking ourselves a series of questions.

The first one is like, can the tech do what we say it can do? So we have the two products.

There's Portal, which is our C2 product.

And then there is Prism, which is the high throughput product.

We've now validated them across not just LEO orbit, but all the way up to geostationary orbit.

And the real thing that matters for us is... that capability, demonstrating it, but also on a timeline that is relevant.

I have no idea how bandwidth constrained those types of experiments are, but what's on the horizon that you think will either be uniquely unlocked by Northwood or just be another tailwind for you?

Why is that technology better? Why is it quicker to deploy, to get going on?

Yeah.

So we do phased array technology for our portal product line.

We do PRISM, which is a parabolic technology for our PRISM high throughput product line.

And each of those technologies have really transformed what it means to build and deploy antenna capacity.

So we kind of clean slated it.

We've been able to build these modular units that you can recombine together and you can ship and deploy in a really rapid fashion.

What's going on there?

Sure

...like what you're actually selling from space, as possible, and you need to do it as at high dollar as you possibly can.

So, like each one of those bits counts for so much more.

Um, and so, you know, my thoughts around that a- are, like point one, if you need to eke out more bits how are you going to do that? You need higher utilization.

That means like more seconds in contact with whatever that end customer is on Earth, making sure you can actually transact for as many seconds as possible.

And then how do you send as many bits as you can per second.

So like y- you get as, as much... as many bits out of each of those seconds as you possibly can.

Mm.

So why didn't the US build out ground stations for this?

I guess it depends on the customer segment.

So for a government customer segment, they tend to procure their spacecraft and their ground systems separately.

So space systems were the major focus for a long time.

And ground segment was kind of just the afterthought.

People think about, what's the thing that you're putting up in space? And for a number of programs, the ground was just not really contemplated.

And so they started running into issues for that.

What does this scale out look like for you and the space industry?

So for each of you, is our current space infrastructure up to the challenge of the growing space economy? And Bridget, I can start with you on that.

I mean our our company would say that it's not and I guess like when it comes to the networking infrastructure that connects earth and space specifically.

You can think of spaces having gone through a couple of different generations like there was the era of space, where communication between earth and space was very simple.

were just a handful of spacecraft and tended to be pretty static.

So there's, you know, the orbit in space called geosynchronous orbit, where a satellite basically, you know, matches the orbit of Earth.

And so it's... appears to be stationary over a certain location.

So you can imagine from a networking perspective that makes things really simple and straightforward, where you can have a single networking link on Earth connected to that satellite.

Brigid, are there things that you think government should be doing to help in this area? Are there policies that need to be undertaken, investments that should be undertaken? What do you think government should be doing in this area?

Like how did it all happen? What year was it? Talk to me about that.

We started talking about it, like the three of us in 2023.

And Griffin had been the one who'd been building the technical prototypes.

I'd been thinking more on the operational side of the business and Char was bringing the industry expertise, having worked in the ground segment specifically across his career.

Combining those three things together, We really were recognizing the same problem that I mentioned, that networking for the space economy is really what drives its value.

And there's a significant bottleneck, and that bottleneck actually is not in space.

It's actually on Earth.

And this is like where this approach makes more sense.

Yeah.

The problem that we're solving is for every satellite, it requires a connection point back to Earth so that they can control the spacecraft.

It is kind of like a remote control car, where it needs some mechanism to make sure that it's going where it's supposed to go, and a way to actually bring that data back to the users on Earth.'Cause that's where the users are.

So that point of contact on Earth is called the ground infrastructure, and super basically, if you don't have it, you don't have a space mission.

It literally is just like a rock in space you're doing nothing with.

So ground infrastructure, it's completely fundamental.

And for us, we were observing the space industry, how launch cadence was increasing.

Please

Mm.

So we handle from the moment that there's a contact made with the spacecraft, all the way to, uh, the, the point of presence somewhere around the world that a spacecraft operator has themselves hosted, uh, that, that entire chain.

So that includes hardware, that in- includes modem, that includes network backhaul, that includes, uh, software interfaces, APIs, um, and the actual control plane for moving that data.

Um, that's kind of a, a, a stack end-to-end on ground that hasn't been managed by a, a third-party ground provider before.

And so that's what gets us excited, because when we take on that big, that big chunk of the pie-

-is kind of what I'm getting at in terms of like more mass to orbit?

Yes, big time.

Uh, we do get a lot of customer inbound, and I think, like, that's a large part of our raise for us.

Let's start by just asking, why did you need to raise $100 million here? There must be a need for that capital.

Yeah, absolutely.

Thanks for having me again.

It's great to be speaking with you all.

For us, it's really about taking space missions further faster.

I think you guys have been really tracking the developments in the space industry over the past year, both on the commercial side and on government side, domestically and abroad.

There's a ton of enthusiasm for what we can do in space and really changing our our perceptions on what's possible.

So what is your unique selling point? How are you differentiated from others that have been winning contracts?

What does it take to deploy a ground station? Are you just like under miles of red tape or is it easier than you think? Yeah.

No, there's a lot of red tape, which we revel in that.

That's our jam that we want to make sure the space industry doesn't have to worry about.

But think about it.

You're trying to license use of spectrum.

Scarce resource.

You have to be permitted to emit radio frequency.

What does the world look like in this world of, you know, ample satellite communication? What can people do that they couldn't do before?

they? What are they?

Both commercial and government.

I think for us, we're excited to be a dual-use company where we are building common capabilities, common geographies, being able to pass on those economies of scale to our customers.

If you look at the government sector, those are companies that are dealing with existing networks that are more brittle and that are low in capacity.

The opportunity to leverage commercial to get more capacity fielded very quickly and to be able to inform our capabilities in that way is something that we've actually, like I've even received LinkedIn DMs from different folks that are really enthusiastic about the capabilities.

And so, yeah, both commercial and government.

How long is 30 million going to last you, Bridget? You've just raised it, but I hate to ask when you're going to have to do it again.

Yeah, we're operating in the hard tech sector.