Henry Kwan on Icarus: solar-powered stratospheric drones at 60,000 feet with 30+ successful flights and Army contracts

a lock box. So I still stand with the uh with the Gerson accounts.

It's incredible.

But we have our next guest in the ream waiting room uh from Locus payment infrastructure for agents. How are you doing? Please introduce yourself and tell us what you're building.

Tie-dye shirt on TVPN. We've done over a thousand interviews.

I don't think we've ever seen one. This is unique. I like it.

It's a first. It's a first. Thank you.

Yeah. And and they uh you know, thank you. And so they actually switched me up uh with the other guy.

I sorry.

Great. Well, Henry Tie, welcome to the show.

Yes, sir.

Henry from Icarus. Uh please introduce yourself and tell us what you're building.

Yeah, so I'm Henry, founder and CEO at Icarus. my background, aerospace engineer at Georgia Tech. Built drones for NASA and satellites at orbital.

Icarus were building solar powered autonomous drones that fly at 60,000 ft

for weeks at a time.

Close to the sun.

How close to the sun? Not the closest, but

not the closest. And and in fact, if if we flew any higher, we'd actually fall out of the sky. So, we want to stay at 60,000 ft.

You're like You're like, but but but we're we're gonna try flying a little higher.

Okay. How many how many hard tech How many hard- tech companies were were in this batch? M

uh I believe like 5 to 10.

Yeah, that seems about right. And so I feel like it's been like steadily at

5 to 10 for

forever basically. So

uh take me through uh the bare case for Stratospherics drones. Um yeah, what I've heard is, you know, people always refer to the SR71. It's such an amazing plane. It flies, I think, around 60,000 feet. Uh the SR71 Blackbird. It's this amazing Loheed Martin plane built at Skunk Works. Flies super fast. Uh we can't build planes like that anymore. We don't have it in us. And when I talked to folks who were like, "Yeah, it kind of sucks we can't build that because it was really cool, but we have satellites now and satellites go way higher and way faster. And so if you need to put a camera over something, uh we usually just use a satellite. So why not satellites for this use case?"

Yeah. From first principles, you're 20 times closer than lower Earth orbit.

Mhm. and you can say fix an area.

So just from an engineering perspective, it makes a lot of sense.

The bare case is pretty much like none of this is new. Even what I'm doing, the solar powered version,

um it's all been done. It's just been too expensive.

Sure.

So the question is like can you get the cost down?

Can you how are you doing that? Is it just being a startup? Like are you using cheaper materials? Are you standing on the shoulders of giants? It's like what are you leveraging to actually make it?

Yeah. Well, we'll talk about the form factor first because I'm on the website and this thing just looks like a massive really skinny bird. [laughter]

So, it's very unique. Very unique. It's Icarus1.com. Icarus

or sorry, Icarus.1.

Icarus.1. Correct.

Yeah. The to your point, John, it's about getting the right product specifications.

Okay.

For the first go to market.

Oh, wow. And so, yeah, our first product, it's a 20 foot solar powered bird. Uh, flies for weeks at a time.

Yep.

The bird the bird noise is perfect.

Uh, so so it's effectively like a loitering drone that's just sitting at 60,000 ft. And it's I'm assuming it's it's incredibly light. You're you're uh it's it's solar. It has a battery, but it can it can uh generate uh solar power on the fly to to increase the battery life effectively. Like it's not efficient to hold it in the air forever yet, but

uh but it can stay up over a specific area. So is this primar primarily like defense applications early on? Who who are you trying to sell this to?

Yeah, act one is all defense. I do think this is much bigger than a defense company. I [snorts] do see the stratosphere as a category and um and once you kind of are able to uh make the stratosphere affordable then there's many things you can do. So one easy example like yeah today you can't really carry very heavy payloads. You can't carry and deliver a lot of power but what the future looks like and there's like no laws of physics that says you can't do this. You can essentially take like a Starlink satellite and have that in the stratosphere and imagine if you had this Starlink satellite that's 20 times closer and fixed over an area. Uh so then that's like that's the future and what you can do from that it's I don't [snorts] know it's anyone's imagination near-term there's a lot of clear direct uh line of sight towards defense and a market there again it's like really difficult it's not it's not like a a category yet today there's there's no real markets but uh with defense there's there's a clear need

uh very cool how do you actually get the drone up is this something that you launch uh like a rocket hit and then it and then it sort of spreads its wings at some point. Like how do you actually get a 20ft drone 60,000 feet in the air?

Into the air.

You use a balloon.

You eat it.

Oh, you use a balloon. Okay.

Okay. That's [laughter] That seems less violent than yeeting a 20 foot drone.

Some Some drones are yeetated. I believe this is a real thing.

So you use effectively like a weather balloon to take it up.

Are you a beneficiary of Starlink?

Are are we a competitor?

No, no, no. A beneficiary like like beneficiary

like like can you use Starlink effectively as like the backbone for communications?

That is our beyond line of sight method.

Sure.

Yeah. So we have Starlink on it as an option.

Yeah, that's very cool. Um

yeah. Yeah. Fascinating. So uh how how close are you to actually getting this up in the air? Have you flown? Uh is it just test at this point? Are you actually going to sell these things? How how

uh we are selling them today to the Army. Okay. And yeah, we've done uh over 30 successful stratospheric flights, successful demos with Special Ops Command, SOCOM, and the Army as well. And we have Oh, there you go.

There you go.

There we go.

Yeah, super impressive traction. I noticed uh is it Ronic on your team? Was that Red Bull Racing before this? How cracked is Ron?

That's awesome.

He is uh he is very very hardcore. Um,

like I imagine if you want to make something that's ultra light, ultra durable, he's your guy.

That's right. That's correct. Yeah. So, a third of our team is SpaceX Tesla. Uh, Ronx worked at Tesla before Red Bull Racing and also SpaceX as well, but he's definitely a character. Um,

yeah.

Awesome. Uh, well, great to meet you. I'm excited to uh to follow along. How the round already done? How's it going?

Yes. Uh, raised a lot of money. Um, [laughter]

there you go. There we go.

Hit the gong again, John.

There we go.

Yeah, buddy. Yeah, buddy.

Yeah,

just coming on.

Absolute legend. You're a TVPN legend. U We might have to uh we might have to make a TVN tie-dye shirt in your honor.

Y [laughter] I love it. Thank you so much.

Very cool. Very cool.

Well, have a good uh rest of demo day. Congratulations on all the progress. Uh very excited to see these up in the stratosphere. Just uh don't fly them too high.

Yep. Exactly. Perfect. All right, Jordy, John, thanks so much.

Have a good rest of your day. Goodbye.

Um

what a legend.

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