00:39:13 · Jordi Hays, Harley Finkelstein
[00:39:13] S0: To me... [00:39:13] S4: That hasn't happened. I think it's gonna be like Google where you've always had ads, but most people click on the organic searches because it feels more legitimate. It feels more Yeah. Organic. [00:39:22] S0: But I guess but I guess what I'm what I'm getting at is like, I still think that in some ways, I think it would be relatively fair and I don't think merchants would have a big issue if agents are creating all this demand. As long as they're showing... As long as they're willing to pull from the entire Shopify product catalog and they're not just picking and choosing. Right? Like if it's something that... A switch you can toggle on on or off. But... [00:39:45] S4: So I think if it's merit based, think you're right. I think consumers... I think merchants are used to paying for traffic, paying for for customers. I think if it's done, I think right now, best I can tell, the AI applications wants to get as many consumers using these AI applications as much as they can. So John having an amazing experience with the raincoat means he's probably gonna come back for the next time. I think right now that is what their focus is. [00:40:08] S0: Yeah. Absolutely. Well, great stuff. Thank you for coming on. Appreciate it. Great. Thanks for having me. Road to road to BFCM. BFCM. It's gonna be a ban. It's upon us. It's upon us. Yeah. I can't wait. I can't wait. Awesome. Cheers, dude.
00:40:08 · Jordi Hays, John Coogan, Bridgit Mendler
[00:40:08] S0: Yeah. Absolutely. Well, great stuff. Thank you for coming on. Appreciate it. Great. Thanks for having me. Road to road to BFCM. BFCM. It's gonna be a ban. It's upon us. It's upon us. Yeah. I can't wait. I can't wait. Awesome. Cheers, dude. [00:40:24] S1: Talk to you soon. Goodbye. Let us tell tell you about Cisco critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless real time experiences and new value with Cisco. We have Bridgit Mendler from Northwood Space back on the show. We talked like a month ago. Think the new founder. Always a joy. Bridgit, welcome to the show. [00:40:45] S0: Out of control. Out of control. [00:40:47] S6: You know, we gotta we gotta keep the regular cadence of conversations. Know. So I gotta I gotta keep doing things. [00:40:53] S1: Yeah. I know. Give us the round. Give us the details. With the gongs warmed up, I want Jordi to... [00:40:58] S6: Right on. Yeah. We just finished our $375,000,000 series c fundraise. So that's... Yes. Thank you. Thank you very much. [00:41:10] S1: And and talked last time, but what what what was what the key unlock? Is it is it technology milestone, financial milestone? What really unlocked this particular fundraise?
00:41:10 · John Coogan, Bridgit Mendler
[00:41:10] S1: And and talked last time, but what what what was what the key unlock? Is it is it technology milestone, financial milestone? What really unlocked this particular fundraise? [00:41:22] S6: 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 c two product. And then there is prism, which is the high throughput products. 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. So we were able to turn that capability around, get it fielded in a matter of days. So it's basically, you know, can we perform at speed and can we actually hit the performance specifications that we are are saying we can do? And then at that point, it's a question of scale. Have we kind of proven to ourselves that we can actually scale this product? We have produced at this point 29 units of hardware across the We've done two production runs. We're now in our bigger scaled up facility, 185,000 square feet that's ready to produce hundreds of antennas. And so we we kinda convinced ourselves we were ready for that scale. And then ultimately, it's been, you know, a tremendous year for the space industry in terms of just validating the original Northwood premise, which is the volume and data is gonna go up by a lot. So, yeah, we were ready for the next milestone.
00:42:31 · Jordi Hays, Bridgit Mendler, John Coogan
[00:42:31] S0: Super impressive. And then demand, like, demand side, like, what's going on on that front? Like, I'm assuming a lot of it's still, like, kind of, hey. If we do this thing, like, will you give us a lot of money? And so far, it seems like the answer is yes, but but break that down. [00:42:47] S6: Yeah. I mean, there's there's the whole range from a lot of net new signed customers as well as exactly what you're saying, which is huge amounts of demand as new customer sets are examining space fresh for the first time on the commercial side, but also on the government side, just huge waves of of funding and programs that are becoming more solidified. So all of those things at the same time and a lot of different customer priorities, but that's what we're, you know, built to support. [00:43:16] S1: Are you thinking about the the breakdown of different opportunities in space? Obviously, there's a lot of satellite Internet traffic. That's so exciting. There's there's imagery that's happening. There's also AI potentially happening, but unclear how bandwidth heavy that will be. And then just yesterday, SpaceX announced Starfall doing microgravity experiments for bio. 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?
00:43:54 · Bridgit Mendler
[00:43:54] S6: Yeah. I mean, exactly. Like, the industry is diverse. And frankly, like, that's what we think is really important and what we're solving for. So the way that we've designed our product is so that we can fit as many industry use cases into portal and prism, our our two product lines as possible. And so when we're looking at those use cases that are coming up and are are interesting, the kind of, like, overall, customer requirements that... Or or customer features that align with us is is it a customer that cares about scale, and is it a customer that cares cares about reliability? Like, these are customers that are managing constellations that need to, hit that scale on aggressive timelines, but also really assure high levels of uptime that historically, you know, third party ground has not been able to offer. So that is things like comms. Comms is is a use case that has a particular amount of pressure there. And I think, as you said, pushing into higher and higher throughputs is a really exciting problem. And and for me, I think that's especially exciting as we talk about overall volume of data and space becoming more important. But use cases like you described, whether it's star fall or or others on the actual lower bandwidth side are also tremendously exciting. And it's also a very key national security priority. So... Yeah.
00:45:04 · John Coogan
[00:45:04] S1: On the national security side, what's the supply chain look like? I was I was reflecting on the fact that the the new iPhone... I think we're on 08/18. It's been almost twenty years. I think this one is the first one that has an Apple modem in it. They finally moved on to their own Yeah. Their own hardware stack. And I'm wondering, like, are are you supply constrained in any way, or are you thinking about... I don't even know what goes into building a ground station like other rare earth magnets, or is it just metal and aluminum or do have license technology and IP from, like, Qualcomm or some other company? Like, what does that supply chain look like? I imagine you're not bottlenecked right now because you're still growing the company, but what's coming down the pipe?