00:00:00 · Molly O'Shea, Eric Romo
[00:00:00] S0: We've just raised a massive series d. This was a $500,000,000 round. This brings your total funding to over 1 point o $25,000,000,000. [00:00:08] S1: A little over a billion dollars. That just means the margins 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 is in the tens of millions of dollar of value for a single flight at Helios. China launches XYZ thing. It's headed towards GEO. The reality is from the ground, we 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. That's why you've seen us get a lot of traction in that market. [00:00:58] S0: Eric Romo, welcome to Sorcery. [00:01:00] S1: Thank you for having me. [00:01:01] S0: Thanks for having us here. So where are we today?
00:01:01 · Molly O'Shea, Eric Romo
[00:01:01] S0: Thanks for having us here. So where are we today? [00:01:03] S1: We are in Impulse, Spaces headquarters 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 Manhattan Beach Boulevard. We've got a few buildings here, but you're gonna see the dense and intense portion of our factory. [00:01:23] S0: 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?
00:01:34 · Eric Romo
[00:01:34] S1: 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 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's the time to go ahead and do a round. In particular, we had the firms that led the round are one through seven Ventures and Banner VC. One through seven has known us for a while. They're relatively small shareholder before this round, 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 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, which I think is gonna get a lot of news for them. I think they just actually, just a few weeks ago, raised another couple, dollars 700,000,000 in new funds as well. In addition to SpaceX, they're big shareholders and BREC shareholders. And so they're a firm that's been like maybe a little bit below the radar for the last few years, but I think they're now coming out. And so it was exciting to see them essentially, decide that we were the next big ones in space. That's a real big endorsement coming from somebody who runs more than 1% of SpaceX. And then Banner is a new firm, but we've known the GP there for a while, as investor that, his prior fund, as a shareholder in impulse.
00:03:40 · Eric Romo, Molly O'Shea
And so, again, both of them sort of tracking the company and watching that growth really start and saying, okay, now's the time to write bigger and bigger checks. And then very fortunately, you know, that happened pretty quickly after we decided we wanted to raise a round. 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, hey. You know, what do you wanna do in this round? It's kinda starting to come together. There's evaluation, etcetera. And then see how much of the round they they might take up versus we wanna 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. [00:04:30] S0: So this was a $500,000,000 round. This brings your total funding to over $1,025,000,000 [00:04:37] S1: Yeah, a little over $1,000,000,000. [00:04:38] S0: You got the big B.
00:04:38 · Molly O'Shea, Eric Romo
[00:04:38] S0: You got the big B. [00:04:39] S1: Yeah, yeah, there you go. Yeah, yeah. I mean, so, you know, I think some people maybe think that they're putting numbers up on the scoreboard and they should be excited about that. That just means the bar just got higher for us, right, about we've gotta return that capital and then some, right, to those shareholders, which means we need to build a really big business. And so it's exciting, obviously, to have that amount of funding to run the business. We had quite a lot of money on the balance sheet even before we raised this round. So there was no kinda forcing function. You know, it wasn't sense of urgency or anything around it. But now we just get to expand the business and hire. I think some folks internally would argue we've been a little bit cautious in how we've hired. I mean, we're a company now almost 500 people. That's a lot, obviously. But I think we arguably could have hired even faster than we have in the past, but really wanted to make sure we had the throttle at the right place where we had enough runway and had enough business, we're kinda matching those things. This funding will allow us to be just a little bit more forward leaning in the people we hire and how quickly we staff up, a little bit more forward leaning in facilities and capitalizing the business. So I think it's gonna help us to have the freedom to execute that maybe we were holding ourselves back a little bit before. [00:06:00] S0: So this unlocks hiring, expansion, what else?
00:06:00 · Molly O'Shea, Eric Romo
[00:06:00] S0: So this unlocks hiring, expansion, what else? [00:06:05] S1: That's the bulk of it. I mean, people are really the biggest place we spend money and the biggest resource that we need internally. And so this will allow us just to continue to hire great people. Think in the past, we would really limit ourselves and kind of hold ourselves to site budgets, which we'll continue to do, but budgets will be higher. And that meant that really talented people maybe didn't make the cut, right, to get hired. And I think this allows our hiring teams to say, Okay, let's go make sure that if it's an amazing person that works in the stuff that we do, let's make sure we find room for them. And capital always been a thing we've invested in. Think it's an interesting conversation around businesses like ours and just how capital intensive they really are, because I think there's this perception outside of hard tech, deep tech, whatever you wanna call the segment we're in, that they're incredibly capital intensive and you can't imagine how much you're spending on CapEx, but that's not really the case. I mean, you're gonna walk around and see stuff, and certainly we do buy awful lot of machines, but people are by far and away the basic expense of the company and that's gonna continue. [00:07:09] S0: So what does scale actually mean for Impulse?