Dispatch Space is growing semiconductor crystals in microgravity to produce defect-free wafers — first paying customer already signed

Speaker 1: CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. Our next guest is Payton Akshay from dispatch. I accidentally introduced him a little bit too soon, but we got him sitting down in the YC demo day. What's going

Speaker 2: on, mate?

Speaker 1: How you doing?

Speaker 12: Yeah. It's good to be here. Good to see you guys.

Speaker 1: Good to see you too. Introduce yourself. Introduce the company. Us what you're building.

Speaker 12: So I'm Payton. I'm the founder of Dispatch Space. We build satellites for manufacturing products in space. Mhmm. And these are for the most advanced materials in the world that can only be made in microgravity, and we bring them back down to earth.

Speaker 1: What specifically are you building? Because they're like, the space economy has gotten so fractured at this point. There's, you know, multiple launch providers. There's satellite bus providers. There's impulse space. Tom Mueller has a extra propulsion system that you can bolt on. Like, what is the key product that you're focused on for this early stage of the company?

Speaker 12: Yeah. We build the reentry vehicles. So this is the satellite is in space. You've made your product and now you need to get back down to

Speaker 3: earth. Mhmm.

Speaker 12: You're flying at Mach 25. You're surrounded by a plasma that's 3,000 degrees. Mhmm. We build the heat shields and satellites that can survive that environment.

Speaker 1: Mhmm. Who is doing stuff in space? Like, I live in the world of Varda very closely. Yeah.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Seems like elephant in the room is that we are we are very familiar with Delian because Delian's our friend.

Speaker 1: And and it seems like obviously they're going vertically integrated building the reentry vehicle and also doing the contracts with biotech companies and pharmaceutical companies. But it does seem like the industry is expanding. So who are the other buyers that aren't working with Varda that you have an opportunity to to work with?

Speaker 12: Yeah. The biggest players are semiconductors, pharmaceutical, and biotech. Varda is very vertical

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 12: In that pharmaceutical application.

Speaker 1: Mhmm.

Speaker 12: We're big we're the biggest bulls on the semiconductor space. Think that the regulatory environment makes it so that you you can come to market a lot faster and the applications of growing those gallium nitride and indium selenide crystals in space are massive. And that's where that's where we're bullish on it.

Speaker 1: Massive. I'm I'm down. Semi everything that touches semiconductors is massive. You say semiconductor, you're a trillion dollar company. But timelines, the timelines, like, it it it feels like we're a decade away from making a chip in space, making a chip on the moon. Like, even

Speaker 2: Yeah. But

Speaker 1: even the big SpaceX bulls are saying, like, okay. Actually, doing the mass driver, that's maybe more than ten years away. Let's focus on the

Speaker 2: stuff. Like, what traction are you talking about this demo day? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So

Speaker 12: we have a pilot mission that we're flying with a paying customer to grow semiconductor crystals in space.

Speaker 1: Oh, okay.

Speaker 12: And we're not talking about doing like the lithography or assembly of iPhones in space. It's about it's earlier in the supply chain. So wafers Wafers. Wafers actually come from these cylindrical crystals.

Speaker 1: Oh.

Speaker 12: And when you grow those in microgravity, you get up to a thousand times fewer defects. So you grow those crystals in space Okay. Bring them back down to earth, and then you cut them into wafers. And that is actually happening now on the ISS. These companies are looking to scale. Okay. They just don't have the vehicles to do it.

Speaker 1: Oh, very cool.

Speaker 2: How did you make your first dollar?

Speaker 12: The first dollar was deposit on the pilot program.

Speaker 2: No. No. No. In life. In life. I want I want the I want the founder origin.

Speaker 12: Oh, yeah. It was probably working in a smoothie shop that I totally loved the smoothies of, wink wink. I I was, you know, I made a few tips and that was that was about it.

Speaker 2: You realized you weren't cut out for smoothie business.

Speaker 1: Gotta go in the semis.

Speaker 2: It's meant to go to the heavens.

Speaker 12: Yeah. Yeah. Fab fab fabs in space are a little easier than getting tips at a smoothie shop for me.

Speaker 1: That's amazing. What's the state of the the space investors that have attended demo day? Are you seeing traction? How's the fundraise going?

Speaker 12: Yeah. The fundraising is going great. Obviously, IPOs are very useful for us. Oh, sure. So that's been great indicator of where the entire market is going. We're getting close to closing out that round, which is super exciting for us. And, like, really, that goal is getting back to work as quickly as possible and using that money to go build great things in space.

Speaker 1: That's fantastic.

Speaker 2: Dan in the chat said, from smoothies to a smooth opera.

Speaker 1: I like that. Well, thank you so much. Great

Speaker 2: to meet you, Payton.

Speaker 1: Coming up soon.

Speaker 2: Congrats on all the progress.

Speaker 1: Have a great one.

Speaker 12: Thanks so much.

Speaker 1: We'll talk to you soon. Cheers. Goodbye. Our next guest is Akshay from Madrone, building cooling systems for data centers.

Speaker 2: He is working working on

Speaker 1: and what?

Speaker 2: I'm assuming he's working on reducing water consumption in data centers so that almonds can

Speaker 1: Oh, yeah. Water. Yeah. Yeah. This guy's an almond industry plant for sure. Anyway, let me tell you about Railway first. Railway is the all in one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web app servers, databases, and more while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. Thank you, Jordy. Let's bring in Akshay from Madrone.