True Anomaly raises $650M Series A to build space-based interceptors and mission software for the Space Force

Speaker 1: next, we have Evan Rogers from True Anomaly. He's the CEO. Evan Rogers raising a massive round. How are you doing? Well, what's going on? Doing well. Yeah. Pretty Is it your first time on the show? Because I feel like Jesse Michaels introduced us, like, a year ago, but did we ever make the connection?

Speaker 10: No. I don't think so. And Jesse would have forgotten because he's all in UFO land now. Yes. Yes. Well I want that too. He also has a better show. We gotta do a UFO deep dive at some point. Absolutely

Speaker 1: love Jesse. He's the best. But we're not here to talk about UFOs. We're here to talk about space based interceptors, very real technology. But since it is your first time on the show, I would love a little bit of an introduction on yourself and the company just for those who aren't familiar.

Speaker 10: Yeah. You got it. So I started Tournomaly four years ago with with three other cofounders right out of the military. I spent twelve days out of the military, spent ten years in the air force and had a front row seat to basically, the weaponization of the space domain. So really watch China and Russia go build space weapons, realize there wasn't an industrial partner focused on solving the problem at scale. Yeah. And then just happened to have the stupidity and the hubris, but just enough vision to go start a start a defense tech company from scratch. And so went out to go fundraise, in in sort of the March, April time frame of 2022. Couldn't even spell VC, learned how to do it learned how to do it live, and the rest is history. Here we are.

Speaker 2: Was 20 were you doing the twelve days? Wasn't that like when SPB failed? That was like the worst time or was that '23? I think it was '23. That was the following year. Okay. Okay. So But why did you feel like you had twelve days to relax? It was such an important problem. No. I'm kidding. You're absolutely right. Take us through take us take us through the first four years.

Speaker 10: Yeah. The first four years were all about Jackal and Mosaic and getting those capabilities to orbit as quickly as possible. We have a fail fast, fail forward methodology for building our systems. And Jackal is really the first ground up space to space engagement platform in in history that is purpose built for space superiority. So think like an f 16 for space, trying to go after highly agile targets. Mosaic is what operates that spacecraft. And so we we booked a series of launches to go get that hardware on orbit and get it tested. And in the midst of all of that, build really a book of business around space superiority and then just have recently won the space based interceptor program along with a few other folks.

Speaker 1: So if I have a satellite that's doing something bad up in orbit, it's probably going extremely fast. How are you gonna take it out? This is purely hypothetical.

Speaker 2: This is purely hypothetical.

Speaker 10: Well, there's look. Yeah. Satellites are basically just space computers. Right? Yeah. So there's a lot of ways there's a lot of ways to kill computers. Unfortunately, you're not, like, dumping dumping water on the keyboard in space. But but, you know, there's two classes of weapons for space control. One, they're nonkinetic weapons, which are kind of like think jamming and lasers Yep. And then kinetic weapons. Yep. Usually, when you're engaging targets in space, the closing velocities are actually much lower. Right? So you're you're not trying to optimize for really, really high closing velocities. You're not, you know so those things are hard to target, and so you wanna get up close and personal with the target spacecraft.

Speaker 1: Does the trajectory at which you I I imagine that you you said space to space. So you launched the capability on probably a SpaceX rocket or similar rocket. It's up there. And then at some point, it gets a command to go and and engage. Is that roughly correct?

Speaker 10: Yeah. You got it. You can be a you can be a space fighter pilot, John. Okay. So then

Speaker 1: once once it gets the command, are there I I guess my question is like, there only a subset of targets that are viable because you are inserted into a particular orbit and you can't just like do a U-turn and go the other direction and you can only engage things that are like sort of loosely on the same trajectory in the same orbit? Or can you actually navigate around? Because I know that even getting from, like, LEO to higher orbits is extremely difficult from a fuel perspective. You might not be prepared for that. Like, how constrained are you once you have an asset in orbit?

Speaker 10: So it all depends on how much fuel you have and how much time you have. Right? And so generally, though, when you're dealing with threats in geosynchronous orbit, for example, you would deal with those threats within geo. Mhmm. So it all depends on time, and it all depends on what's called delta v. Yeah. If you have a lot of time, you need a you can use a smaller gas tank and lower thrust acceleration systems like electric propulsion. But if you need to be sort of more tactical

Speaker 1: and responsive, you want a chemical system. And that's really constrained by things like your launch volume and your your form factor and packaging of the spacecraft itself. Yeah. But you can bring fuel with you because the rocket is providing the the vast majority of the delta v necessary to get into orbit, get the initial acceleration,

Speaker 2: and then what you do from there is brought along with you. How do you get your reps? How do you guys get your reps in? Yeah.

Speaker 10: The other transporter missions are are have really opened up the space for a lot of industrial players, transporter missions and and, other ride shares. So we booked I think we booked our first mission with an Amex credit card. Cool. I think we put a $3,000 deposit. There's a picture of us in the early days booking our first flight fourteen months out. But those are those launches are every, you know, every few months. Now they're pretty booked up. The supply is pretty constrained now, and SpaceX is really the only provider that's providing this kind of big rideshare missions where you have sixty, seventy spacecraft going to orbit at once. Mhmm. But for military those are for our test and evaluation missions or product demos. For military missions and intelligence missions, you typically have a ride booked by the by the government. Mhmm. That makes sense. Talk about but but but I meant more like if you're on one of these

Speaker 2: transporter like a SpaceX kind of like shared shared launch. Is there is there junk in space that you can go target? Like is there like like how do you how do you actually like basically practice the capability once you're once you're up there?

Speaker 10: Yeah. It's a great question. You you can find you can take a target with you or you can find a an inert object in space to do what's called a rendezvous and proximity operations. It's a term that was created by NASA in the late nineteen fifties. And brought it to own proximity operations was used in the Gemini program to practice for for Apollo. And so there's a lot of stuff in space as you pointed out, but sometimes you do that with a partner. Later this year, we're gonna be conducting a mission called where we're gonna practice this operation in space with Rocket Lab. Oh, cool. Very cool.

Speaker 1: Okay. Switching gears. Talk about Mosaic, the mission software platform. And I'm particularly interested in how do you actually track what's in space? Are there stealth satellites? Is there already a separate company that's tracking what's in space? It feels like everything in space should be extremely trackable, but at the same time, it's a massive amount of area to if it's on the other side of the planet, we might not have something there. Like, what what goes into actually understanding space and then planning missions?

Speaker 10: Yeah. It's a great question. There's there's a lot of ways to track objects in space. You can track them from space. You can track them from the ground. Mhmm. And they're usually using two types of sensors. So you're taking you're using a telescope on the ground, you're tracking reflected sunlight off of the spacecraft, or you're using an active sensor like a like a radar, for example. Mhmm. And there's a lot of clutter in space. And there are companies like LeoLabs, for example, that make it their full time job to collect all the information they possibly can about objects in space, and they do that with radars from low Earth orbit. In deep space and geosynchronous orbit and cislunar, radars really can't reach, and so you have to use in situ optical system or or ground based optical systems, but you have coverage gaps. And so one of the problems that the military is trying to solve, by the way, is reducing coverage gaps in these higher altitudes. Imagine trying to do the Bin Laden raids, like finding Bin Laden. If you could only track where we thought he was every other Thursday between 12:00 and 12:05. Yep. That's not the way the military likes to perform operations, particularly intelligence and and surveillance operations. And so the Space Force is trying to step up to really proliferate space with a bunch of sensors. Jackal's there to solve that problem. And where Mosaic fits in is, you know, when I was a military officer to fly satellites, I had to work with four or five different systems, computer systems that wouldn't talk to each other. And if I had to do something complex, like, maneuver the spacecraft, it would take two to three weeks of planning. Military ops in space are much, much higher cadence than that, and so we designed Mosaic to really enable this autonomous human to machine teaming and multi vehicle heterogeneous teaming that allows operators to train like they fight, practice against a sparring partner, and then operate space superiority systems at scale.

Speaker 1: What's the manufacturing look like right now?

Speaker 10: So right now, Jackal's manufactured in Denver. We'll be manufacturing another product in Long Beach. So we have a 90,000 square foot factory down there. In Denver alone on one line, we can build about 50 Jackal spacecraft a year. So those are about a thousand pound vehicles about the size of a of a refrigerator, maybe too many fridges together. And we can we can crank out about 50 a year in that facility today.

Speaker 1: Wow. That's remarkable. What about headcount planning, the fundraising round? Take me through, like, the more recent growth of the company.

Speaker 10: Yeah. We we are growing. We started this year with 250. We'll end this year with between 450, 500. So we're really in the blood scaling phase next year. Next year, we're 750 to a thousand, and then kind of the next twelve to eighteen months scaling up to around 5,000. 5,000. Yeah. Wow.

Speaker 1: That's huge. And then take us through the fundraising. What happened? Yeah. So incredible

Speaker 10: round came together. You know, after after we were selected for the Space Base Interceptor programme, that was really a catalyst to bring this round together. Insiders stepped up. Will Cofield at Riot, Seth Winteroff at Eclipse, guys that have been with the business ride or die for a long time. Chats. Our other insiders yeah. They're they're they're classic. Real real ride or dies.

Speaker 1: That is that is true. Have we had Will on the show yet? No. That's crazy. Me too. How are we not Will's

Speaker 2: like a friend. Friend. Yeah. You knew that. Gonna ask you what's your favorite now now that we're talking about it. What's your favorite what's your favorite thing about Will?

Speaker 10: I mean, his, you know, his devilish good looks obviously should be an inspiration to us all. And his hairline, frankly. I'm envious, you know, on a He was billed for television and yet he doesn't come on the

Speaker 2: show. Like, oh, no. He's Yeah.

Speaker 10: He's actually definitely you know, he's got like some of the worst social anxiety I've ever seen for such a good looking guy. He's a nerd at He's, you know, he's he's he's a hardcore nerd at heart. So Seth Seth also at Eclipse, incredible partner for us. We brought in Paradigm on this round. We brought in Atreides on this round and and a couple of others that were Key, Van Ack, on others g two. And then we had massive insider support beyond our beyond our leads, Menlo, Excel, Meritec, others. What was the total round size? 650.

Speaker 1: Congratulations.

Speaker 2: Thanks, man. Let's go. Final question. Final question. Will we ever actually have space fighter pilots? Will it ever make sense for a human being to fly around something like a Jackal?

Speaker 10: Yeah. I think so. What? Human in the loop? Why? I think so.

Speaker 1: Deep space. Okay. Because of the lag. When

Speaker 10: I left the military, I actually, I got promoted to major, I really only had one goal. Yeah. And that was to have the first human battleship, interplanetary battleship named the USS Jolly Rogers after my call sign. So we're we're driving towards that that outcome, and it starts with single seat fighters in space. But that's a while from now. That's a while.

Speaker 2: But it's very exciting. Oh, I can't wait. I I'm I'm a fan. It's great to it's great to meet you finally. And congrats

Speaker 1: to the whole team. Thank you so much. Thanks taking the time to come and chat with us. Cheers. Have a great day. Up next, we have a guest in the TVP and UltraDome. We have Maria