How Astranis built a satellite company without billionaire backing

Executive overview

Most founders assume hard tech requires vast capital before anything can be built. Astranis proved otherwise: two engineers built a prototype satellite in a San Francisco apartment and raised one of YC's largest seed rounds at the time.

Their approach was to set an audacious, concrete demo-day goal — a working satellite prototype in three months — and treat investors' inability to ignore the result as their fundraising strategy.

If you can show proof before asking for money, hard tech is fundable at the YC stage.

Starting with a minimum viable satellite

• John Gedmark (aerospace engineer) and Ryan McKlinko (early Planet engineer) combined launch-industry knowledge with startup-building experience.
• Applied to YC Winter 2016 — one of three aerospace companies funded that batch alongside Boom and Relativity Space, all now billion-dollar companies.
• Goal entering YC: build a working satellite prototype in three months, bring it to demo day.
• Built prototype on Ikea desks with ESD mats; clean room was PVC piping with shower curtains sprayed with staticide.
• Constraint forced focus: demo satellite needed only to prove integration and basic operation, not production readiness.

The demo day pitch that unlocked the seed round

• Pitch addressed the two blockers head-on: "seems impossible" (countered by showing it was already done) and "seems like a science project" (countered with a clear $122B market opportunity).
• John practiced the pitch 50 times over three days; raised one of the largest YC seed rounds at the time.
• Seed proceeds funded an actual satellite launch — capital was tight enough that the team moved into the apartment where they'd been building.

Scaling from one satellite to a dedicated Falcon 9

• First commercial satellite launched in 2023 — the first YC-backed company to launch hardware into space.
• Brought vibration testing (shaker table) and thermal vacuum testing in-house; each thermal vacuum test runs 7–10 days with the satellite fully powered.
• Discovered they could also run ion thruster tests inside their own vacuum chambers, eliminating a costly third-party dependency.
• Now manufacturing four satellites simultaneously for a dedicated SpaceX Falcon 9 launch — one of the first new companies to book an entire Falcon 9.
• Operations scaling from 1 satellite to 5 this year; next-generation system in parallel development.