The Creative Destruction Lab (CDL) has been successful and growing. CDL is an accelerator program whose unique approach is to take in a wide variety of startup ventures, expose them to sectoral mentors, and slowly eliminate them until a few top-flight companies remain. They started in Toronto, but now have branches across the United States and Europe, showing growing appetites for the opportunity to compete and succeed.
CDL’s space stream has been running for four years now. Featuring a variety of space sector mentors, most famously former Canadian ISS Commander Col. Chris Hadfield, the program has had its share of successes. It’s also had its share of issues, most notably some problems with Canadian representation among its competing and winning firms. This year, however, the CDL’s space stream seems to have been a success, featuring some positive reactions from graduates and a promising Canadian company in Obruta Space Systems.
Here’s a summary of some of the startups’ feedback, and a round-up of the seven successful ventures.
Feedback reveals a positive CDL experience
Two companies discussed their experiences with the CDL in separate conversations with SpaceQ: Prewitt Ridge and Obruta Space Systems.
Prewitt Ridge is a Los Angeles based company that’s looking to help unify the spacecraft design process by, as CEO Steven Massey put it, “manage what we consider the messy human layer of engineering.” They’re producing a requirements management tool called “Verve”, which can take any changes in requirements by a firm’s customers and automatically integrate them into the tools being used by the company’s engineers and designers. This helps to eliminate siloing, reduces the possibility of wasted or incompatible work, and brings a certain level of “agile development” to the spacecraft design process, and potentially to the manufacturing or operational side.
Massey said that their experience with the CDL was “incredibly positive,” and praised their “fascinating process” where “so many startups enter, and only so many will leave at the end.” He was impressed by the way that a “founder will describe your company, and then the machine of CDL works on it and molds it on what you told them…it forces you to really dial in the value proposition in a way that can be repeatable to other folks”.
He was impressed by the CDL’s mentors and venture managers as well. He pointed to some direct mentorship from Nathan Kundtz that helped his company understand the value of a “freemium” version of the product, and said that the long CDL process was valuable for giving them the space to design and implement that version. He also said that their experience with the venture managers (and the CDL administrators in general) was positive, and pointed to the CDL’s pairing of late-process ventures with Rotman School MBA students as something that benefited his company.
Massey said it was a “tight ship,” even with the challenges that came from a remote process. He said that it felt complimentary to their equally-positive experience as part of TechStars in 2020, as that the shorter TechStars process and longer CDL process both benefited his company.
Obruta Space Solutions, the accelerator’s sole Canadian graduate, had a similar outlook, and Obruta’s founders (CEO Kevin Stadnyk and CTO Kirk Hovell) both weighed in on their experience.
As mentioned in our recent story on Obruta, they’re focused on providing the software tools that orbital spacecraft can use for docking; both for situations where both craft are working together to dock, and where one craft is attempting to dock with an uncooperative or unresponsive one. Their company has transitioned from a focus on space debris clearing to one that’s facilitating docking, and it’s a transition that had a lot to do with the CDL process.
Like Prewitt, they were impressed by the assistance they received from the CDL’s mentors. Stadnyk said that “we worked with experts spanning the industry, from investors, to previous founders in both space and non-space industries, to retired astronauts” and that they went “above and beyond” to help Obruta succeed. Kirk said that their experience with the mentors was “fantastic,” adding “in no other accelerator have we had the opportunity to discuss our company’s strategy, vision, and concerns with subject matter experts.” Stadnyk said that the venture managers were also “extremely professional,” providing “consistent check-ins” and “quick communication.”
They said that the CDL helped change their company’s focus. CDL’s mentors helped them (according to Stadnyk) realize that “we had to pivot our business away from hardware towards software. We received advice from mentors on how to navigate such a pivot in our business model, as well as the things we should be focused on to execute that pivot. This advice really helped us land up where we are today.” Hovell said that the mentors “treated us like equals and wanted to hear what we had to say,” and that “the pivot was successful and aligned our company more with our passion and with a bigger growth potential.”
Like Prewitt, they did acknowledge that there were challenges involved in the virtualized program, but that (Stadnyk said) “the online sessions were extremely well run with virtually no technical problems.”
CDL’s other graduates
This year’s other graduating ventures feature everything from space traffic controllers to hardened computing platforms.
Kayhan Space, from Boulder Colorado, focuses on collision avoidance in space. Pointing to the growing number of objects in Low Earth Orbit and the continuing challenge of dealing with space debris and other satellites, Kayhan Space is working to provide satellite operators tools to detect and avoid collisions, particularly with each other. Its collision avoidance system, Kayhan Pathfinder, takes information from U.S. Space Command, commercial data providers and satellite operators’ GPS signals, and uses machine learning algorithms to predict potential collisions and assist operators in avoiding collisions. They’re also veterans of the Techstars accelerator, and closed a $US3.7m seed round in December.
Leanspace, located in Illkirch-Graffenstaden, France, bills itself as the “first cloud platform for space missions.” Noting that “a wide variety of software systems are required to operate a space mission,” they contend that too many companies are creating in-house software solutions for problems that are either already solved or are basically generic. Recognizing that off-the-shelf solutions aren’t necessarily the best choice either, Leanspace is offering a cloud-based platform that automates those non-unique, generic functions, allowing operators to focus on the parts of their software that are uniquely appropriate for their mission. Leanspace just announced that they’ve raised a US$6m seed round.
Lunar Outpost, based in Golden, Colorado, is focused on building rovers and other technology intended for the surface of the Moon. They’re working on their first rover, the Mobile Autonomous Prospecting Platform (MAPP), which will be a part of the Intuitive Machines IM-2 lunar lander in 2023. A second rover will also be on Intuitive Machines’ other lander scheduled to launch in 2024. They also successfully demonstrated oxygen production on Mars with their MOXIE (Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment) system that was part of the Perseverance rover. They concluded a US$12M seed round in May. Interestingly, they also have a terrestrial offshoot focused on air quality monitors.
NewOrbit Space, from London, England, aims to build satellites intended for very low Earth orbit, only 180-220 km above the ground. They say that it will “reduce the cost of your mission dramatically,” reducing satellite mass, launch cost, and needed communications power. As aerodynamic drag is an issue, their satellites will have air-breathing engines that “collect atmospheric particles right on orbit, compress it and accelerate trapped particles up to 100 km/s.” While the website doesn’t give more details on the engine, based on the description it’s reasonable to assume that it’s a specialized type of Ion Engine.
Novo Space is making what they call “lego-like computers for satellites,” where “customers can plug and play…to create their own high-performing subsystem.” They use the SpaceVPX standard, recently ratified by the defense-focused VMEbus International Trade Association, to create what they call an “ecosystem” of cards, memory units, backplanes, and other computing components that are robust and rad-tolerant enough to operate in space. Their plug and play computing hardware is reminiscent of Leanspace’s software platform. Unlike Leanspace however, they have not shared their fundraising situation, with their Crunchbase entry saying that they had raised an “undisclosed amount” in Pre-Seed funding.
All things considered, it seems to have been a good year for the Creative Destruction Lab’s Space Stream, with a variety of companies that are getting out of the more standard space “streams” of launchers, Earth observation, and communications and fighting hard to distinguish themselves.