The Startup Turning Space Into a Logistics Network

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 higher orbits 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 you doing?

Great, great to be here, Alex.

I'm so excited that space companies are raising enormous amounts of money. It seemed for a long time like it was gonna be 3 AI companies and literally no one else. So before we get into technology, let's talk about the round itself. How hard was it to raise? Did you get all the money you wanted and how long did it take?

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 seed 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? Um, we, we kept upping the size of the round to let in, uh, new investors and, and fulfill our current investors. So, uh, it went great.

I just read between the lines there. It sounds like Impulse is absolutely not capital constrained at this point in time.

That would be true. Yeah.

Would that perhaps be an understatement based on your reaction to my comment?

Possibly.

Well, I mean, it's not a bad place to be. You're working on some pretty hard stuff and, you know, I don't mean to be negative about any company's struggles, Blue Origin, but like 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, you know? Yeah. So it makes a lot of sense. Okay. Now I think people have probably heard of Impulse Space, but I don't think they have a really deep understanding of, 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.

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 and they do their 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, it can go up to another spacecraft. We did that last year between two of our spacecraft. We got within, uh, 1,200 meters of each other.

Wasn't that with Starfish Space?

Starfish was the kit on board, and they, they were commanding us to, uh, to, to rendezvous up with, with our other spacecraft. So it's really cool.

I saw that. It's fantastic. So in terms of what people are using Mira for, I know you've had a couple of missions, couple of launches, but when, when people talk about the core use cases for it, is it moving satellites to higher orbits? Is it moving mass around? What's the the most critical thing it does today?

It was when I first designed it, when we just started the company, it was just our first product. It was, it was to go up on, you know, on a transporter and eventually, hopefully on Starship and, and be able to move, you know, all this cargo going to orbit. We always say it's like, it's like a container ship coming into port and now you need trucks and vans to, to, to move this stuff to other places. Like the graphic on your on this podcast, like the trucks in space. I love that. Yeah.

Well, so, so it's kind of like a pickup truck essentially. It's, it's functional. It can go anywhere. It's not— it doesn't seem to be the most complicated thing you're going to build. We'll get to Helios in a second. That seems much more complicated. And I presume it's affordable for companies that have a need for it.

Yeah, it's, it's very affordable. It's like we always told people, if you want to go to a specific spot in space, You know, that we're trying— you don't like where Transporter brought you, we can put you in a different spot for cheaper than a dedicated launch like, like on Rocket Lab. And it would be less to do that. It turns out most people were just happy where Transporter went. So there wasn't that much of a response commercially for it, although all three of the, of the missions that we've flown have had commercial customers on it. And there's other reasons why it's just not a compelling business case for, you know, for that type of thing. Turns out Space Force really liked it. So we've got, you know, over half a dozen of them in production right now, mostly for government stuff. Some of them, the new version of the spacecraft is capable to go to geosynchronous orbit to 22,000 miles out where the radiation is much worse. We're designed for that. So, and some of them are going up there, going up way high.

And that's predicated on the updated Saif engines that have more thrust, I believe.

Um, we upped, we upped the Saif, uh, from 5 pounds to 6, upped the thrust on Saif, uh, from 5 to 6 for Vast, basically for the Vast space station. We, we provided the propulsion system for the Vast, uh, Haven 1 space station, and they wanted a little bit more thrust, so we just ran it a little higher. And we're just using those because, you know, it's, it's like the the version 2 of SAFE. It's our latest, latest one, but we didn't really need more thrust for Mira. Um, okay, we'll take it.

I'm confused there's not more commercial demand for it, because to me, the ability to go from LEO to GEO is— just seems like a thing that would happen pretty frequently. What am I missing in the market?

Mira can't go from LEO to GEO, so—

oh, it's more limited than that?

Yeah, it can move, like, it could go from the bottom of LEO to the top of LEO, say, from from 300 kilometers to 1,200 kilometers. They can do that probably up and back. Um, that's— once you're in the orbital band, it's pretty easy. But, but going from LEO to GEO is about— is, is over 4 kilometers per second. Uh, MIRA can do 900 meters per second. So we're off by over a factor of 4 from that. Okay, that can do that.

We're going to get to Helios in a second, but for folks who are curious why we're talking about speeds and not height, uh, to make a piece and piece of space object go higher, you make it go faster, essentially, Tom, right?

We talk in terms of delta-v. Um, that's, that's how you move around space, is you add delta-v. Now you basically, you add impulse. Literally, impulse is adding delta-v. Um, that's, that's the name of our company, is adding rocket impulse.

I thought it was very apt. Okay, so that's Mira. That's been probably what people know about Impulse if they've been tracking the company for a while, which brings us to Helios, which is I think my dad would jokingly say, "Mira on steroids." It can go higher, it can go further, it's got more zoom. And as you said, if you want to move things quickly in space, strap a rocket to them. So tell me about Helios.

Helios is a rocket on top of a rocket. It's, it's basically a third stage that we would add to like on our first flights on Falcon 9. It has, you know, a big tank, a big aluminum tank that holds 12 tons of liquid oxygen and liquid methane. And it's got a super high performance engine, that guy right there. Pump-fed engine that provides 15,000 pounds of thrust. Probably going to be the highest performing hydrocarbon engine ever built, very high ISP. And we do two burns. So we get dropped off on a Falcon 9 at 200 kilometers. We do two burns and we're— and you're at GEO at 22,000. So in a day, in about 8 hours, you're there.

I have to just plead ignorance on— I think you said ICP. What does that acronym mean?

ISP is—

ISP, sorry. Yes.

What is it? Specific impulse, which is basically the measure of the rocket engine efficiency.

Okay. No, I knew the term, not the acronym.

It's the gas mileage for rockets.

Yeah. Okay. So we're going to have these up, I think you guys said in 2027, is that right? Yes. And talk me through the use cases for this. And maybe if you could, Tom, explain why Helios can do stuff that's more exciting than what Mira could do because it has more power and such.

So it was designed to, to, you know, the original, uh, use case when I designed it was to take a 4-ton satellite, which is kind of the GEO market, you know, sweet spot— 4 tons directly from LEO to GEO on a, on a, on a Falcon 9. So on a rocket that's flying, you know, several times a week. Um, what it does, like right now, most of the commercial GEOs are going on a Falcon 9 to a transfer orbit, and then they use onboard electric propulsion and take up to, you know, up to 10 months to actually get to the final orbit.

Because electric propulsion doesn't push very hard.

Right, right. It takes a lot. You're using the energy from the sun that you got to collect over months to make enough oomph to get you— impulse to get you up there. So we do it in a day because we, you know, we burn all of this propellant in like 15 minutes. And so you're there. So it basically does what Falcon Heavy does, for tens of millions of dollars less money.

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So I was reading through your guys' discussion about why Helios is going to help us get to the moon, and I think you said something like you can get, uh, 3 or 4 tons there, something like 10x less cost. And it struck me as kind of like odd that we've been doing multi-stage heavy launch rockets to get stuff up into higher orbits when your system lets us use a much cheaper rocket with the third stage being already in, in space. So why didn't we think of this before? What— it seems obvious now that I've read about it.

Most launch vehicles have a lot of flights to LEO, so they— all modern launch vehicles have optimized to two stages. In the past, there were three-stage vehicles. In fact, the Russians, the Proton was a four-stage vehicle. So staging is super efficient, but it just adds more cost and more complexity. So you, you like to only need it when you, or use it when you need it. So we see a need to get to high energy orbits for, for Helios. Like, like you mentioned, we can, we can increase the payload, uh, to the Moon on a, on a Falcon 9 by about a factor of 4 in our calculation.

Oh, 4, okay.

And we've looked at, uh, with a, a, a Mars case, we can increase the amount of, uh, payload to Mars by about a factor of 5. So think about that. For, you know, our, our sale, our price for this thing is $25 million, and a launch vehicle is like $70 to $100 million. So you're getting 5 times the payload for only $25 million more, only for like one quarter of your total launch cost. It's such a compelling product.

It's like, it's like the Falcon 9 moment, but for, for post-launch Yeah, in-space movement. It's the GPT-3 moment for getting stuff to higher orbits and other planets. I, I'm really excited about this.

It's actually selling pretty, pretty, pretty well for something we haven't flown yet.

Normally I wouldn't ask a space CEO this question, but let's, let's, let's do this. How confident are you that it's going to work the first time?

This is a premium product. That's why we're just taking our time to make sure it's right, because it's really got to work. But You know, this is rockets. And as we have seen many times, and in fact recently, rockets are hard, but man, rockets, rockets are hard. We want to not blow up the pad. We just, we want to, we want to make it right. We want to make it up there. If it doesn't light in space, well, that's bad.

But in Blue Origin's defense, it was an amazing audiovisual moment. You know, I was very disappointed as someone who really wants to go up to space. So the more, you know, like, like large capacity launch vehicles we have, the lower the cost, the higher my chance of making it up. I was really disappointed. Disappointing for them. I, I hope they, you know, pull it together.

It was great to hear that they expect to fly again this year. That would be a good recovery.

That would be incredibly impressive given all the photos we saw of what was left of their, their launch facility. Uh, now with Helios though, I have a question about reusability or lack thereof, because I know that some companies are working on in-orbit refueling. It's always seemed very nascent to me. Given that you're putting up this rocket into orbit with a lot of heavy fuel. I presume that this is a use it once and then let it go off into the void.

Yes. Yeah. Like I mentioned, it's cryogenic in liquid oxygen and liquid methane, so it won't store very long on this stage. There's no reason that it couldn't be reusable. I would love to reuse it, but it would, it would require propellant depots in LEO and GEO. So you would, you would fill it in LEO take a payload up to GEO and then, and then refuel partially. You don't, you only have to have a partial refuel to come back down because you're empty if you dropped your payload. Yeah. So, and then you could cycle it. But I think we're a ways away from having propellant depots.

How far are we for the volumes that you're talking about here?

Well, SpaceX needs to do it, you know, well, needs to do tankers, uh, in order to go, go to the moon and do the things they want to do. And hopefully they'll eventually do propellant depots. So probably, you know, 5, 10 years out. And there's other companies working on— I've been talking to other companies that, that are trying to do, uh, propellant depots and say, yes, we're— we will buy, we will buy propellant from you.

I ask because I was just trying to get my head around what you guys are building and, and, and how to think about it in more pedestrian terms to explain to people. And I kind of like the, the pickup truck analogy for Mira. I think maybe we could call Helios a semi-truck, like an 18-wheeler, bigger, more efficient, goes further, et cetera. Yeah. Uh, but I was curious if you're building the vehicles that are gonna get us around once we leave our gravity well, or if you're building the transportation network, which would include, I think, not only fuel depots, but also some way to help coordinate inside of the orbital environment. And so how big are your aspirations for the company? Just trucks, or do you wanna be the person who's doing the logistics management as well?

I haven't thought about that too much, like the, the, the gas stations in space yet. I don't think that will be us, but it could be. But one of the things we work on is landers. We had started a Mars lander with Relativity a few years ago, and we're trying to get into the CLPS, the new NASA moon lander. We're really excited about the moon base and providing supplies there and also eventually bringing materials back. That's part of our, of our in-space logistics.

And, and Helios can get stuff to the moon, quite a lot of it. Does the, the Helios product, once it's out and, and, you know, flying, does that change dramatically the economics of humans building slash living on the moon, or is it more of a, a useful but more gradual change in that equation?

I think it, you know, it can, it can, it can provide, uh, it can increase the payload from like 200 kilograms to like like 1,000 kilograms on a, on a Falcon 9, or it can get you to like 3 or more tons on a Falcon Heavy. Um, right, so we can provide cargo, you know, rovers, things like that to the Moon. To do bigger things like, you know, like a human lander or something would require a bigger rocket and, and a, well, something what, what we call Mega Helios, like a much larger version of Helios with multiple engines.

I at no point in prepping for this chat that I read the words mega helios. So you're going to have to explain to me how big this bad boy is going to be.

Well, we looked at if we, if, if, if, if we put a third stage on Starship, it would— I'm trying to remember the numbers. It's been a while since we made these numbers. Something like 50 tons of propellant and 6 of these, these engines, the Deneb engines. Yeah. And then we could take like 30 tons, I think, to the moon, roughly rough numbers.

30 tons to the moon, that's— you could even start bringing liquid water at that point. Yeah, maybe frozen, but like 30, there's a lot of wiggle room in 30 tons. There's less room in 3 tons and there's basically no wiggle room at all in 200 kilograms or whatever.

But this is just an exercise. We don't have— we're not working with, with, with SpaceX on this. They, they want to do it their way anyway. But, um, some— one, one can dream. It's— well, no, I'm just glad— look at what we could do.

I like the aspirations of having an even bigger Helios, but okay, let's go back and ground this a little bit. Helios starts to fly next year. You guys said in an announcement that you have, I think, a number of customers into 2028. So what industries are most excited about Helios and what do the first couple of missions, you know, that you can tell me, what are they looking like?

Yeah, well, we've announced SES, who's, you know, probably the biggest comm satellite company in the world, one of the biggest. Oh, uh, flying there, we're flying, you know, large single, large payload, like the 4-ton, uh, class that was designed for. And then we have, um, the— we've sold a couple of caravans that we call, which is our rideshare, so we can take multiple. And us, who have we announced? Like, Astronith is on there. Okay. And, uh, now I'm drawing a blank, but we got—

we've got a few customers on that already too, so So not, uh, with Mira, you mentioned that the Space Force really liked it. So this is more any— in terms of Helios, we're seeing more private market demand.

Yeah, well, in order to do government stuff, we have to, we have to be onboarded through NSSL, the, the National Space Launch, uh, lanes, which is highly contested. This is the thing that SpaceX sued to get into all those years ago. And now, you know, all the new launch guys want to get in there, and, and we have to use that too. So it's pretty politically charged, and you know, there's, there's a lot of politics around it. But like I said, Helios is such a compelling product. It can help— what, what it can do for commercial, it can also do for government. I'm pretty confident we're going to get somehow, uh, flying government payloads. The— I mean, the largest customer in the world is, is the US government, so we, we want to fly their payloads.

For now, Have you seen our debt? Um, I— yeah, sorry, that's, that's an intrusive thought there that I had about the economy. I'm like, yeah, we are right now, but I mean, in 10 years, I don't know, maybe could be France for all I know. Yes, I, I, I worry.

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So you mentioned before we started chatting that the moon's very important to you, and I am curious why that's the case. I am also a, a science fiction, you know, dorkin. But I'm curious, why, why in particular the Moon? Because some people say no, it's too soon, we need to go to Mars instead, we've already been to the Moon. Um, so why do you think it matters for— let's keep this a small question— humanity as a whole?

I think in the near term the Moon is more important because the Moon has anything, everything that we would need to build megastructures in space. And what kind of megastructures would we want to build in space? Probably start with AI data servers. This is something I've been talking about for a long time. Compute needs to move to space. Power for compute's growing at least 15% per year. That's such a steep exponent that it just becomes crushing after a few decades. So this has always been my thesis. Eventually compute needs to move to space and use the, you know, the unlimited power of space. And it's already happening. Elon's already doing it. And of course the next thing when you're building megastructures in space is, it's literally about 20 times less energy to bring material from the surface of the moon to low Earth orbit than it is from the surface of the Earth 200 miles up to low Earth orbit. So pretty soon the economics say, let's just get all this material from the moon. And then that's where additive manufacturing and things like that really come in. And Elon's already talking about mass drivers on the moon. So it's already fallen into place, you know, using the moon, the resources of the moon to to build megastructures in orbit.

So on the subject of data centers in space, perhaps on the Moon, perhaps in orbit, you know, pick your poison. I was talking to Philip from Star Cloud, you know, before this became a more common point. And he said something very interesting to me. He said, you know, our company, if you want to back it, it's a bet that we're gonna see launch costs decline massively. Otherwise it just doesn't make economic sense to take this much stuff up into orbit with our current set of rockets. And this was before Starship's, you know, most recent successful launch and before New Glenn and so forth. Yeah. How much of your company's success hinges on the same point? Are you dependent on new heavy launch vehicles reaching a frequency of launch that we're still hoping for, or does the company work even with the kind of Falcon 9 generation of, of launch vehicles?

It works great with, with Falcon 9. We would love to, to fly on, you know, like on Starship. I think that could greatly lower our cost. We could fly 3 Helios at a time.

Oh wow.

On Starship. Um, so if even if Starship was selling at Falcon 9 cost, would cut our costs in by a third, our launch cost by a third. So, um, that could, that could really help.

Okay. And now one thing I saw you guys are working on is engines for landing vehicles. You mentioned that you were working with another company on a lander for Mars. What's the benefit of vertically doing that yourself versus working with partners? I know that SpaceX, where you used to work, is huge on vertical integration. And so I'm curious how much of that DNA you're kind of bringing with you into your new company.

We are extremely vertically integrated. That, like you asked, we raised $1 billion. Where does that money go? You know, mostly to become, I mean, for employees, but also to become vertically integrated. Vertically integrated requires a lot of capital, but once you become vertically integrated, you have the power. You have control over your cost, your schedule, and your quality. So it's really important to become vertically integrated, I think, and especially in the space world because space vendors are notoriously late and expensive.

Why, why is that? Is that just a lack of competition amongst those vendors?

It's, you know, it's because the primes don't care. It's cost-plus contracting. It just builds up this whole environment, the space industrial complex that just has this really expensive, really prima donna thing. We always had this quote, you know, this saying at SpaceX, if you go for— if you go to ask for a quote for a part and it takes you a month to get the quote, you don't want the part.

No, nor do you want the price that they're going to charge you for that price schedule.

Like it's already It's already like a preview of what you got here. It's like, no, no.

Well, on this subject, a data point that caught my eye— I forget if this was in Ars Technica or Space News, but I think it was your president said that you guys don't need new manufacturing footprint here in the States because you have enough space to do all the work that you're doing, which I think is pretty cool. But I'm curious about the personnel side of this. You mentioned the cost of people, and it seems that there are more space companies in market than ever, which makes me very excited. But I'm curious what's— what the impact that is on like the space talent market, which I presume is a smaller pool than, say, software developers.

Absolutely. We see it. It's a little harder to recruit now. Thankfully, we still do it. We're still doing a great job. I think we're a pretty exciting company. So we've been— yes, done quite well. We, you know, we've more than doubled in last year. We just passed 500 employees. We've got Open Rec reqs for about 200 more. Um, so we're hiring really fast. But like you said, like, there's so many startups, a lot of the very experienced people, like, coming out of SpaceX and other companies, um, are going and starting their own company.

Yep, yep.

I mean, and then they're grabbing all their buddies. So it's, it's become rarer to get the, the truly, you know, like, the Tom Muellers out there.

So, uh, I— the last thing I want to do is bang on about someone else's IPO, but I am curious if you foresee a future which, after SpaceX does list, that people become a little bit less attached to the mothership and might be more willing to break off and come work for what you might call the next SpaceX, like Impulse?

Yeah, I think so. We'll see.

I mean, I'm going to call you about that because I'm really curious, because I'm hoping, you know, fingers crossed, that we end up with a, like, like a post-PayPal IPO Cambrian explosion of talented founders. Because as much as I like your company and want it to succeed, I would like to see 10 more because I would like to— I would like to get to space as quickly as possible. Okay. Before—

oh, please. Well, I just was going to say, we've already seen, you know, like, like myself, the, you know, the, the SpaceX mafia, all these companies like an Elsa Gundu in here in this area and all these companies, some space companies, robotic, all kinds of companies. It's just been supercharged now with the IPO.

Yeah, well, I just— I hope that we get even more because I hate— I hate driving. I want to go to space and I hate waiting for commercial flights. So there's a lot of stuff that I want to get built. Okay, one last question on the rideshare front. I absolutely love this idea. Can you explain to people who are not familiar with, with how this works, what rideshare is for Impulse, and then also what it does to commercial access to this sort of technology? Because I presume that it makes it a lot more feasible for more companies.

Yeah, it's, it's so hard to get to GEO that it's really rare to get a rideshare to GEO. Sometimes, you know, some companies like Probably one of the ones I can think of recently is ViaSat. They fly gigantic payloads like 7-tonne comsats, so they require Falcon Heavy and there's still a little bit of space left so you can put your 300-kilogram payload on there as a rideshare. It's very rare. It happens every few years. Yeah, there's a few others that go there direct, but it's super rare. So there's, there's actually quite a backlog of, of customers both commercial and government that want to go to GEO, small, small ones that want to go to GEO. So we're off since we have the highway to GEO with Helios. We offered this rideshare thing and it turns out it's very popular, selling out.

Yeah, your first, your first actual mission has already been sold out.

Do you— Yeah, we're filling a second one.

Oh, wow. Okay. And then how, how frequently will you run these? Is this something that's going to become like a monthly cadence to GEO or is it going to be more of a one-off event when you have— It'll be a while before we get to one a month.

I think there— I think there's a market of, of, you know, there's probably 20 about things going to GEO a year right now. We could maybe capture half of that with this really compelling thing. So it could be almost on the order of once a month, some of those being rideshare, some just being large compsats.

20 things to GEO per year sounds pathetic to me. Is that all we've pulled off as a species? We should be at least 2,000.

Well, remember, you can have— you can cover the whole Earth with 3 satellites from GEO. That's the, that's the whole point of GEO. Yeah. You don't need, you know, thousands of them like when you're in LEO. So there's not as many going. It's still a super important orbit, but there's just not, not as many going. And there's only so many orbital spots. Remember, like if they're, if they're 1 degree apart, you have 360 because it's just a line around the equator of the Earth. So you can't pack too many in there because they start stepping on each other as far as signals and all that.

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How much of a problem is going to be crowding in the various tranches of orbit around, around the planet? Because I keep reading people saying, oh, space trash, oh, explosions, oh, collisions, and everything seems to kind of keep rubbing along just fine, Tom. So is that a real concern in the near term, or is that more of a we'll solve it in 100 years when we get there problem?

I think it's, it's going to be less than 100 years where it's going to require, you know, more active management, you know, Certainly, you know, the, the people putting up large LEO constellations are good stewards. So they're, you know, they're, they're, they're maneuvering, they're, they're bringing them down when they're done, which is what you have to do when you got so many satellites. We have some other players that are leaving stages up there and polluting space, which is really bad.

Yeah, I'm not going to list those out just to annoy your PR team, so I'll keep them to myself. But yeah, no, it's a real problem. Tom, an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for coming on and telling us about this. When you have your next major event, please come back and tell us all about it because I, like I said, want to get to space. I think people like you are going to help kind of pave the way. And if it comes down to it, I will ride in Amira for a little joyride if you can put a little, little hab on there for me.

Okay. Absolutely. Thanks, Alex.

All right. Thanks, Tom. Today we are not going to talk about humanoid robotics. No, no humanoid robots. They get all the headlines, they get all the money. But today we're going to talk to a company with a product actually in the market with real customers helping move the economy forward using robotics. I know, novel concept, but please join me in welcoming to the show, it's Tessa Lau, the CEO and founder of Dusty Robotics. Tessa, I'm so glad you're here. I'm really sick of everyone showing me one robotic hand moving like a Pokémon card from here to there and claiming that they've revolutionized the world. So to ground us, what does your robot do and why does it matter?

We are, we've built the most accurate mobile robot on the planet. And what it does is we are revolutionizing construction by printing floor plans on the floor of construction sites. Construction sites. The reason that's important is because the way buildings get built today is that someone prints out the floor, the blueprints, on a big sheet of paper. They take it out into the field, and then they're on their hands and knees using measuring tape and string to mark out all of the locations of where everything goes inside the building. We've automated that process with robotics, and we've built essentially an inkjet on wheels that goes around, takes that digital version of that blueprint, and it prints it on the floor so that everyone can build exactly what they're supposed to.

Now, there's a multi-trade element to this because when you're marking out stuff on a floor plan, you're not just putting walls in. I presume there's electricity inputs and all sorts of other materials. So what can your robot actually write down on? I, I presume mostly concrete.

Mm-hmm. So if you've ever built a house or remodeled your house, your architect has probably handed you this huge sheaf of papers. Yes. In that sheaf of papers, there's a sheet for every single trade. So you've got one for the plumbers that tell you where all the, the plumbing lines go. There's one for the electricians that says where all the light fixtures go, where the light switches get installed. There's one for the, for the, for the framers who like build the walls and put all of those in place. And so what Dusty does is consolidate all of those drawings together and prints them in a single pass over the floor so that everyone who walks on site, anyone who's installing anything inside the building, they can see exactly what they're supposed to build on the ground and they can see what everyone else is going to do around them. And that eliminates all the conflicts that happen during construction.

Clearly using a tape measure or chalk line to lay out designs on a foundation seems to be incredibly risky because humans aren't particularly precise.

Mm-hmm.

But is there an element of, oops, now we need to change things? So let's say your, your robot goes out there and does all this excellent printing and then someone has to move a wall.

Mm-hmm.

What do you do if you need to, um, get out the big eraser and kind of scratch out part of what you've already laid down?

We do the exact same thing that they did before we had Dusty, which is they buy a case of concrete-colored spray paint. Do it again.

So literally it's whiteout for the construction industry.

Yeah, literally.

Yes. That's amazing. I actually didn't know that. That's fantastic. And then talk to me about speed here, because I know you guys can take on relatively large floor plans. But when you say an inkjet on wheels, that does not inspire confidence with speed because I've owned a lot of inkjets and they can be patient at times.

Mm-hmm. So we are tracking at roughly 10 to 17x the speed of a manual layout crew. Which typically means that we can do the same job in about a day that would normally take that crew several weeks.

And what would the cost of that crew be? How many people are we talking about to go out there and do this by hand? Is it one person and an assistant, or is this crew 7 to 10 people and 3 trucks?

So it depends on the scale of the building, right? And Dusty is being used on everything from single-family homes all the way up to huge data centers. So if you're talking like a huge data center, layout typically takes months. Each crew gets— a crew is probably 2 to 4 people. They always go up in pairs because of the process. You need one person on either end of the string. Yep. And, and they spend weeks dimensioning out and marking out exactly what needs to get installed in that building. And so, Desty, you can bring that down to days.

So as we discussed, kind of at both the national and I would say global level, getting to be able to build things faster here is a place we can actually go on to essentially any site from a single-family house to a multi-building massive install and cut weeks to months out of the design and building process.

Exactly right.

It seems like a massive acceleration. So I guess then one more question about how this works in practice. BIM software, there's many different varieties out there. Do you guys support all of the options? Can anyone bring like any design to you and, and your robot can run on it? Or is it only a certain subset of the software people use to design these things?

So the de facto standard in the industry is Autodesk Revit. So it's pretty much the only solution out there right now. There are a couple other smaller solutions, but, you know, they all speak Revit as the interchange format. And so we support Revit and AutoCAD, which are the two primary solutions for 3D and 2D used in the industry.

Okay. So actually not a hard standards question then. Pretty much all the customers will come to you with a file that you can quickly read. Is it Are those large files? Is there any file transfer element to getting that information onto the robot itself, or is that just as easy as sending an attachment?

So the process that we've developed actually has— it starts with plugins for Revit and AutoCAD. And so wherever that design is being created, we have a plugin that sits right there next to you, and that plugin automatically extracts information from those files, preprocesses a little bit, and then uploads it to our portal. Our portal is where all of those designs come together for the first time. And so all the trades, they all connect up their Revit and AutoCAD into our portal, and that allows everyone to overlay everything and then do some more sanity checks, do some more field verification before they print it. And then from there it goes to the robot.

Tessa, are you telling me that before everyone submits their designs to your portal, they haven't been layered on top of each other yet?

They have.

Oh, okay.

Okay. They have. So there's, there's two, there's two types of coordination. The first type of coordination is design coordination. This happens in software. So a GC would typically organize what's called a BIM coordination process where all those designs get overlaid and then they do basic conflict checks like make sure your duct doesn't interfere with my conduit. Right. And because you can only fit one thing in the space at a time. And so you have to resolve that kind of conflict. But even though you have that, that, that coordinated model, it's still not field coordinated. Field coordination is about ensuring that it's constructible, that it matches your existing conditions, that it's buildable. And that typically happens today in the field. And so Dusty's portal actually brings that, shifts that left, as we say, and brings it online.

Okay. So it's not that this hasn't been layered before. It's you're taking those initial ideas and you're applying them more to the real-world environment before they go out in the robot to do Okay, that makes a lot of sense to me. Now, you guys launched the second generation of the Dusty Field Printer in, I think it was January of 2024. At the time, you guys said you had done 91 million square feet of layout with the preceding generation. So how has the second gen performed and is there a third one bubbling along?

Mm. We might have been 2025. We should check that because I'm pretty sure it was last year. So our FieldPrinter 2 incorporates all of the learnings that we've made to date from having deployed this thing in the field. So we're constantly getting feedback from our customers, understanding what works, what doesn't work, and turning that into a hardware solution that we can actually sell and works reliably across a variety of job site conditions. Since we've deployed the FieldPrinter 2, we've actually completed over 330 million square feet of layout. That's lifetime to date with all of our products, all of our generations. But we— it's, it's— that number is growing. It's accelerating fast.

I'm curious how quickly, you know, I talk to a lot of people that are building software and that's the thing that I can call people up and ask how they're using it a little bit further away from the construction space. So I'm really curious about who are your current largest customers and which sectors of the economy are showing particular demand for bringing more automation into the world of construction?

Our sweet spot is really large, complex projects, uh, things like data centers and, uh, and hospitals. Uh, but we've, as I said, we've worked on everything down to single-family homes and smaller projects as well. Um, the data center craze is really driving a lot of investment in Dusty because, uh, we are really the only solution that allows data centers to get built with less time and less money, which is, I think, everyone's absolute goal right now.

I saw a stat that only that, that 60% of data centers earmarked for 2027 aren't under construction yet, and people are worried that the timelines just aren't gonna work out. So anything to remove time. And this actually kind of brings us to the business model in question, because when I think about robots and services, you can either sell the device or you can sell the outcome. So how has Dusty decided to approach that and how has that proved in the market?

We are currently renting the device. Uh, so you can think of it as, uh, we sell robot subscriptions and when you purchase a robot subscription, you, it's like leasing a car. You get access to all of the equipment, plus you get a software license that allows you to use the entire system on as many projects as you want.

Okay. And I know you guys have, um, a series of, so that'll come with the iPad app included. Okay. Is there a services component to this? Do, do, if I was a new customer of Dusty, and I was just going to roll this out to my first project. Do I need the equivalent of Forward Deployed Engineers to help me get this into production?

Yeah. So we actually have a services team that trains our customers. So our new customer would pay for, for an implementation, which includes both the online training of how to use the software tools and plugins, as well as the onsite training, which is how to use the robot. In the field. Those are typically two different groups that are using those two different tools. And so that's why we train them separately. But after all of that, you become Dusty certified and then you can, you can pretty much go on your own.

Yeah, I'm so glad you brought up the, the Dusty certification thing. I didn't realize that you guys had this. Oh, here it is, Dusty Academy. So talk to me about how you've built up kind of like your own in-house certification system. That's not something that I, that I've seen too much of. So I'm very curious about the why and then the impact.

My philosophy is all about removing adoption friction. Like, how do we make it as easy to use this thing as possible? Because that's what's going to let us grow faster and faster and faster. Yeah. And so Academy is really about removing that friction. If people can come to a website, they can self-serve that learning, they can learn how to use the system, they can figure things out on their own, then that speeds us up and it speeds them up too, because they're not waiting on one of us to get back to them with an answer. And so we've actually had some customers just look at the academy, watch all the videos, and either by the time we show up, they're already pretty much trained, or in some cases they don't even need us to show up and we just ship them the system and then they can use it out of the box on their own. And I think that's magical.

Has anyone tried that and not been able to pull it off, or is it actually a relatively simple process that pretty much any customer can get to fluency with in a reasonable timeframe?

There's a lot of tech-savvy people in the construction industry, especially the new generation who are coming into construction. They're, you know, used to technology. Technology. They, they grew up with smartphones, and anyone like that who, uh, especially people who play video games and know how to, like, you know, use a joystick, that's just how you run the robot. It's the same thing.

So what you're telling me is that if journalism doesn't work out in the end, I can come be a Dusty Robotics operator.

Bonus points if you're a gamer.

Basically, I'm the CEO now is what you just told me. So fantastic. That's, that's tremendous. Uh, I, I do want to go back though to the, the hardware point because I love companies that build hardware. But there's two things that I'm not sure about in your case. One, do you have any supply chain risk? I've spoken to a number of people that are building drones, clearly a different category, but they have a lot of supply chain work they have to do to ensure that certain parts don't come from China and so forth. Does that at all apply to the case of Dusty? And then you guys have done things that are mostly on, on flat surfaces so far. I'm curious if there's other applications for your technology inside the construction space that may not be currently attacked by the company.

So we had the fortune or misfortune, depending, of living through COVID, which was the first wave of massive supply chain disruptions. And so we learned a lot during that process. And so we've managed to figure out how to, how to deal with supply chain disruptions. We basically stock up all of the long lead time parts so that when we actually need to build something, we've got all the parts on hand. So that hasn't been impacting us at all. Your second question, which I forgot, can you remind me?

Using similar-ish technology in other parts of the construction process apart from just doing layouts on flat surfaces, because I think you guys can do some stuff on walls as well.

Yeah. So it turns out that 99% of construction layout actually happens on the floor first before it gets transferred up. And so we solve all of that. So for example, if you're installing an outlet into the wall, what typically happens is you mark it on the floor first and what you mark on floor is that you're going to install an outlet right here, 18 inches above finished floor level. And so we will make those annotations on the floor and then everyone who can just walk the floor can see exactly where they need to install it up inside the vertical surface. Similarly, for things that go overhead, we mark an X on the ground and then you take a plumb laser and shoot it overhead and that tells you where to install the thing overhead.

When this is all rolled out and people see it in action for the first time, do they give you guys high fives for turning what was an artisanal hand-done process into something that's dependable, repeatable, and accurate.

One of our earliest jobs was on a, on a hospital project in San Jose. And this, this was during COVID So everyone was wearing face masks even outside on the job site. And, and the superintendent, he was like an old grizzled superintendent. He'd been around the block, he'd seen it all. And he was like, I don't trust any technology and really grumpy. And then within the first 30 seconds, he started whipping out his tape measure and cross-checking and making sure our lines were accurate., and within the first 5 minutes he had like pulled down his mask to show its big grin on his face because he loved this so much.

Well, I mean, it gives everyone the exact same source of truth, right? You can't have discrepancies, debates. You can't have— Exactly. Oh, I did that in centimeters, not inches or whatever. Like it just, it just takes away so much. I, it reminds me in a way, uh, I forget the company's name off top, but they're building a, a robot that just does laying of brick walls.

Mm-hmm.

And I've done that by hand. It's miserable and tricky and not precise and just not something that we are good at as humans. And this to me is another place where we can really apply like just machine precision to make something that we all need so much better. So I'm curious, are there other parts of the construction world that you guys want to apply your robotic learnings to apart from what we've discussed so far?

So the interesting thing about layout is that it sits It's right, right at the center of construction. It's, we call it the linchpin. Basically everything that happens before layout, all the design work, all the pre-construction, it all has to funnel through layout. And then after layout, every, all of the work that happens on site, all the execution parts, that all depends on layout. And so, you know, if you get layout wrong, right, everything downstream goes sideways. And so everyone knows how important layout is. And so because we started there as our, as our first product idea, we have, we've had market permission to both go upstream and downstream. And that's really exciting because it means that we can move upstream into better design tools, better automation of this process of how does the data get to Dusty in the first place. And it also means we can go downstream, which is, you know, every single person or robot, you know, in the future that's ever going to build anything on top of a job site is going to be building on a Dusty layout. Which means that all of the things that we print, we're printing QR codes, for example. And QR codes are the machine-readable instructions all future robots on the job site of where they are and what to do. And we own that translation layer.

So you are the, the scribe for all future robots that they'll read instructions off of to do work. As we see an expansion of robotics inside of the physical labor element of construction itself.

We call it the orchestration layer.

I think this is the first time I don't object to that phrasing. Mm-hmm. Because usually it's like, we're doing enterprise agentic orchestration, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, really? Are you? But this actually makes a lot of sense to me because everything you are, you are bottleneck is the wrong phrase, but you are the thing that everything has to come into and then be based off of. So you're linchpin, whatever the phrase is. On the going backwards from the robot into the world of software to bring things together, it seemed like when you described importing from AutoCAD and so forth, that it was a kind of a solved thing. What can you do on the software side that's still interesting because you've already made it possible to bring in the information, I thought, that people needed to use your robots and therefore build these things?

So I alluded to this earlier. We're calling it field coordination. So it turns out that even though you've completed a design coordination process and you have a fully coordinated design, which you think is going to be your hospital, the moment that design hits the field, everything goes sideways. Because the existing conditions are never what you thought. The columns aren't exactly where, where you wanted them to be. The concrete is inch too short, um, you know, or, or maybe some other things happen. And so the field conditions— design never takes into account the field conditions. And so incorporating the field conditions is part of this field coordination process. Also, constructability is another thing that doesn't get reflected in design. People doing design have never spent time in the field. They're— what?

They're No, they buy them a hat, send them out there, give them a shovel for a week.

Well, they've never actually like held a hammer and tried to build. And the problem is when you actually try to build, this is why superintendents are so valuable. We have this one story about a staircase. It looked perfect on screen, right? Beautiful design. Everything was going to fit perfectly, plenty of space for everything. And the superintendent took one look at that design and said, I can't build that because my guys can't get their hands in between the wall and the staircase to actually install the screws.. And so no one was looking for that. On screen, it looks fine. The tolerances match, right? Right, right. You've got enough space. In the field, you actually need space for people. And that's that field coordination part that typically doesn't surface until you actually hit the field.

If you were going to go out onto a construction site and find out that the concrete wasn't in short or that a pillar was in a slightly different location, to me, that requires something like LiDAR or something similar.

Exactly.

So are, are you hinting at a, a different robot that does something net new, or is this capabilities you might be able to bring to the existing field printers to collect maybe different types of information that you can put to work?

So there are existing scanner tools out there. And so, you know, we're not going to reinvent the wheel. Got it. What we are seeing is we're— we have a service partner network now, and these service partners are actually bundling together the scanning, the coordination, the Dusty together into a value-add service that really solves that entire problem for our customers. And so you don't need to learn how to use those things yourself. You don't need to buy, you know, multiple tools. They can package it all up together in a single bundle and bring that to your job site.

Are the margins when you're working with partners as attractive to Dusty itself, or do you lose some economics in exchange for distribution there?

Well, what we're finding, because our partners are actually bundling together all these different services, they can actually charge significantly more than you would if you're just doing layout.

Oh, so it's a net positive both in distribution and revenue terms for you guys. Mm-hmm. Oh, wow. Well, that brings me to a question about, about capital. I joked at the top that, you know, everyone's freaking out about humanoid robots and throwing hundreds of millions of dollars at companies that haven't really built something that people need to use yet. I forget the exact number that Dusty's raised. I think it was something like $70 million, give or take, Tessa, somewhere in there.

That's what we've publicly announced.

Yes.

Okay.

Ah, good. So I was curious earlier, you mentioned, you know, you stock up on long lead parts. That's not cheap. Building technology, not cheap. Going to market, not cheap. Having two booths at World of Concrete, not cheap. Given the amount of money that's available for humanoid robots, is there a similar amount of capital that companies like yours can access in the venture world today, or are all the VCs so befuddled by humanoids that you're being left outside, if that makes sense?

I think that there's probably— I mean, the VC world is very, I would say, faddish and tends to chase, you know, the new hot thing. Right now, I think AI is sucking up a lot of dollars in venture capital. You know, surprise.

I'm blown away by that fact.

Yeah, exactly. And so I think a lot of people are chasing AI companies and AI returns. Uh, you know, so the, at the, in, in, in the meantime, right, we are here solidly building a company that's got useful product. It's, you know, deployed nationwide and starting to go international and we're solving real pain points for people. And so I think it's just a matter of time until, um, the physical AI part of the world starts waking up.

I, I agree with that. But when you say that's what we've publicly announced, uh, regarding how much money you've raised, that implies to me that you've raised money that I don't know about. Am I? Am I reading the implication there correctly?

I can neither confirm nor deny that.

I'm going to take that as a yes, we have. No, I won't tell you, but don't blink twice. Okay. I want to wrap up with data centers because I'm curious what you're seeing in the market. I want to step back from Dusty itself and just kind of talk about what you're seeing. Everyone listening to this has been beat over the head with big numbers about CapEx and, you know, how fast these things are going, public complaints about it, water usage, etc. But I don't think we have a good feel for are, for one, how big these facilities are and also how many of them are currently in construction. And I think honestly, Tessa, given your company's role, you probably have a really great feel for that. So what can you tell me about the state of the construction rush for data centers today?

So we follow the data center construction world really closely because a lot of our customers are using Dusty to build data centers. You know, what we are seeing is that because of the improvements in speed, accuracy, workflow, that we can introduce, Dusty is starting to become not just a nice to have, but a need to have on data center construction. And so, you know, some of the biggest names in data centers are starting to mandate Dusty, which means that regardless of which general contractor is using— is building their data centers, they're starting to push that requirement down onto their GCs who then come to us and say, hey, you know, we heard about this thing, we are Uh, we need to actually use it.

Is that because they want to go faster or because they want to be more accurate? Because I can see either one being the lead argument.

It's all the same. It all boils down to time and money. And so if you save time, then you save money. And if you eliminate rework, then you save time, which means you save money. So it all, it's all the same thing.

That's fascinating to me. So it seems like you're having a really good kind of market, market pull moment. Um, have you had to build like new fleets of the actual Filaprinter robots to meet this demand?

So it's the same robot, it's the same platform that gets used in data centers versus anywhere else. So no, we haven't. It's just one product.

I meant— sorry, I phrased that terribly, Tessa. My mistake. Have you had to make more of them? Not a new robot, but have you had to build, you know, expand your fleet that you can send out to two different job sites? Yes. From the centralized hub?

Yeah, we are. We're now about 150 deployed robots all across the US and Canada, which is up I think over 100% since last year.

And where do you think that number will be in this time next year?

This time next year, we're planning to have around 200 by the end of the year and then probably even more mid next year.

Are you seeing rising utilization on a per robot basis as your number of units scales?

The utilization is actually pretty constant, what we've seen, although we are actually building new features that actually allow us to increase utilization. So Right now, Dusty is, is most suitable for big, large projects, data centers, hospitals, you know, anything where you have a big open floor plate. You can just set a robot loose and run it. And it's been harder to use Dusty on smaller jobs. So for example, one of our customers came to us and said, you know, we build single operating rooms at a time. Like, you know, it's a hospital renovation and they're just like redoing one, one operating room at a time. But there's so much stuff crammed into that operating room. I would love to use Dusty. But it doesn't work for me right now. And so we've actually developed a new feature that we're calling flexible control, which allows our customers to operate Dusty in these really, uh, environments where they would not have thought to use Dusty before. And so we're basically removing all of these assumptions, like you need a big open floor, you need surveyor control, you need all of these things that allow you to use Dusty. We're eliminating those requirements one by one and opening up the space to using Dusty on a larger variety of jobs, which is going to increase utilization.

A larger variety of jobs, some of which are smaller. Now, one thing I pulled into my notes before we jumped on the mic was that you guys can print as close as 1¾ inch from any obstacle. Now, if you're doing a big open floor plan, not an issue, but if you're doing something inside of an operating room layout, there might be stuff that gets in the way. Is that what you're solving for these smaller rooms, essentially the ability to get closer to stuff and therefore being able to do more in a small space?

It's, it's not about getting closer to stuff because our robot already is the, the leading robot on the market in terms of being able to get close to stuff. What we've actually done, so a little bit more of the details here for the, for the tech nerds. In order to operate Dusty, you need what's called surveyed control points. So imagine registration markers, you know, with a standard printer. So basically in construction, what that means What that means is around the perimeter of your building, there are points marked at known locations, and they're typically put down there by a surveyor who gets brought in to— he scans benchmarks that are located in the environment, monuments. If you ever go hiking and you see like, a metal plate in the earth, that's a monument, right? So a surveyor will know where those are, they'll know how to triangulate off of those monuments, and give you a very precise location of a point. And so they'll do that to mark control points all around the building. But if you're in a single operating room, you're not going to bring in a surveyor to scan those monuments and bring control points into that operating room, right?

A little silly.

Yeah, it's a little silly. Exactly. So it doesn't happen. And so our customers can't use Dusty in those situations until now. And so flexible control allows you to operate Dusty without those surveyed control points. It allows you to scan the existing conditions, your walls, your columns, and then align to those existing features. So that you can still print accurately within a space.

That's super, super cool. What's the smallest thing you could lay out with Dusty that is still construction viable? Like, could I do— I'm just playing around here, but like, could I do like a really fancy doghouse layout?

That would be a very pampered dog. You could if you wanted to. Yeah. So what we're seeing is, you know, we joke about the bathroom remodel being kind of like the smallest. Use case for Dusty. It'd have to be a pretty fancy bathroom.

But yeah, because an OR, if people don't know, is probably 500 to 700 square feet. Like, they're not, they're not, they're not buildings, but they're also not a closet.

Yeah.

Okay. Well, fantastic. I'm really excited about your company because I think that it's the most like real-world application that I've seen from what I would call the cutting edge of robotics. So, Tessa, my last question for you is pretty simple. Are you going to take this company public? And if so, when?

My dream is to take this company public. I don't have a crystal ball, so I can't tell you exactly when, but we are well on our way.

In terms of scale, maturity as an organization, already have a CFO in place. What's the vector that you're describing there for readiness?

I mean, all of the above. You know, we figured out go-to-market. We know how to sell. We are— we've created the most recognizable brand in construction tech already. Um, and, and the eyes on the robot, to be honest, that everyone sees and recognizes.

To explain, if you're not watching the, the video version of this that has B-roll attached to it, their robot has two enormous eyes on its front plate and it's incredibly adorable. It's like, uh, the construction version of those food delivery sidewalk robots, but cuter.

Sorry. Yep, exactly. So we've, we've created all of this amazing momentum. And so we just got to keep executing and doing that and we'll eventually get there.

Well, you couldn't have picked a better time to reach full scale than the current data center buildout because you have just years of tailwinds behind you. So, Tessa, all the best. And when you either announce more money, build a new robot, hit some milestone, hit us up. We'd love to keep track of your success and keep kicking butt.

Fantastic. Thanks, Alex.

Thank you.