Apex Space CEO on building satellites in under a year and the Golden Dome opportunity

Summary

Apex Space is a satellite bus manufacturer founded in September 2022 by Ian Cinnamon, who previously built and sold an AI computer vision company to Palantir, and co-founder Max Benassi, who spent his career scaling production at SpaceX. The company is two and a half years old and has already put a working satellite — Aries SN1 — on orbit, doing so in under a year from clean-sheet design to functioning hardware on a Falcon 9. It has been operational for over a year, which Cinnamon says is rare in the industry: many competitors get to orbit but the hardware fails within days or months.

What Apex builds

Apex makes the satellite bus — the power, avionics, propulsion, and communications infrastructure that lets a payload function in space. Cinnamon's pitch is platform-agnostic: whether a customer wants to image the Earth, collect and beam solar power, or support defense missions, Apex supplies the underlying hardware. Current customers include a hyperspectral imaging operator (capable of identifying crop type and age from orbit), Aether Flux — founded by Robinhood co-founder Baiju Bhatt — which is collecting solar power from space and beaming it to Earth, and undisclosed defense customers.

Golden Dome

The defense opportunity is where Cinnamon is most focused. He points to the recent executive order titled Golden Dome, which calls for space-based capabilities to protect the US and allies from hypersonic glide vehicles and missiles, as the clearest signal of where government demand is heading. Apex's existing defense work positions it directly for that contract pipeline, and Cinnamon says it is what most inspires the company.

Outsider advantage

On whether true outsiders can succeed in space, Cinnamon argues the winning formula is pairing an outsider operator with a deep technical co-founder from the industry. He cites his own background in software and Varda co-founder Delian Asparouhov's venture background as examples — both succeeded because they paired that outsider lens with a SpaceX-trained technologist. Benassi at Apex and Will Bruey at Varda fill that role. Companies founded too far toward the pure aerospace insider side, or with no industry technical anchor at all, struggle.

Apex has more satellites launching soon, and Cinnamon expects the speed — under a year from design to functioning orbit — to become a new normal as the generation of engineers trained at SpaceX fans out across the industry.