Revel doubles headcount to 70 and deploys to nuclear reactors as hard-tech company formation in SoCal surges from 130 to 279 firms

Speaker 1: I want

Speaker 11: a fast takeoff. Cool. We'll do it in a new vertical. How about that? I love it.

Speaker 1: It. Awesome. Have a great rest

Speaker 3: of your day. Great to hang Tyler.... Pleasure. Let

Speaker 1: me tell you about Figma. Agents meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with design system context. On to our next guest. It's a surprise guest.

Speaker 3: We don't know... Introduce

Speaker 1: Introduce yourself. Yourself.

Speaker 3: Sorry. Chaos over here in the ultra dumb today.

Speaker 1: We were talking to Walter Russell Meade and every question, it took us a minute to get the question out and then he would take us on this journey for five minutes. And so we got behind schedule. But thank you for being flexible. Thank you for hopping on the show. How are you doing?

Speaker 5: Good. Yeah. Good to be here.

Speaker 1: Fantastic. What's new?

Speaker 5: Man, since last time... Was that February we talked last? March?

Speaker 1: 02/26/2026. It's been Okay. Almost... Last time we talked, it was like three hundred and twenty days till Christmas. Can you believe it? That's crazy.

Speaker 3: That's hard to believe.

Speaker 1: Now we're only seventy eight days away from Christmas. So just to put things in perspective there.

Speaker 5: Yeah. I mean, we've... So we've taken a nuclear reactor critical with all the atomics with our software. Team has over doubled in size. We're at about 70 folks now. Wow. We've also deployed to several massive industrial scale facilities. It's like 10 times what we've done before, which is like our, you know, kind of rocket engine test site.

Speaker 3: Yeah.

Speaker 5: It's Yeah. Been a heater of six months so far.

Speaker 1: How custom are your deployments? I feel like in the age of AI, being very custom for deployed engineering is very popular. It feels like...

Speaker 3: There's always a problem, you know, the

Speaker 1: sales --... Specific.

Speaker 3: Yeah. Sales team is like, hey, accidentally promise that we build this thing. Now I feel like these customers know that they can probably ask for

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 3: How's that lot deeper customer Yeah.

Speaker 5: So I mean, fundamentally, we're providing a platform for testing and controlling physical So think like, you know, as I said, nuclear reactors, jet engine test facilities, rocket engine test sites. Sure. We enable teams to go much faster, much further than the same amount of time. We're replacing, you know, technology from the eighties and nineties. You have these companies building hypersonic jets, and they're stuck with, like, pre Windows '98 era tech. But, yeah, the platform generally enables the engineers, especially hardware engineers, to be fully self sufficient. So really on our end, there isn't a ton of of kind of forward deployed engineering work, at least in terms of, like, implementation. But we do help them kind of get set up, get rolling, and then, you know, help with any issues that they run into, both hardware and software.

Speaker 1: How many... How how often are you hearing from entirely new startups in the... Either the LA ecosystem or just the the D tech ecosystem? It feels like we went through this crazy boom, and maybe it's cooled off. But are you seeing, like, continued acceleration in

Speaker 11: Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1: Company formation?

Speaker 5: We we hear from people from working on all kinds of different hardware systems. Yeah. I was looking at the SoCal hard tech map Yeah. From 2024 to to 2026, and there was, a 130 companies, and now there's 279. So, yeah. No. I don't see any stopping to this, especially SpaceX going public and doing Yeah. Super I I think we're still at the beginning of this thing.

Speaker 3: Yeah. What what are... Like, how much of the... How much of your team is ex ex SpaceX and is in... Like, what what kind of trends are you seeing in terms of, you know, post IPO? I imagine a lot of people just wanna go and start companies, but some people just wanna build stuff. They don't wanna deal with everything else that goes into building a company.

Speaker 5: Yeah. I mean, yeah, we have a lot of former SpaceXers at Revel. But generally, yeah, no, we are seeing a lot of former SpaceX founders in the area, which like, you know, is great for us because they're like, you know, worked on kind of infrastructure for Starship. They are familiar with some of the stuff I did at SpaceX and, you know, they called me up as soon as they're out and they're they they're ready for some some Tesla control software.

Speaker 1: Yeah. How many... Are are you running into people, SpaceX alumni, are just retiring?

Speaker 5: I I... You know, there's some folks that, you know, they may retire for a little bit Sure. But I think this type of engineer Yeah. Gets bored quickly. So I think we see people kind of go through that rotation, come back in after a few months. Yeah.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Few months. There was a... There was an article in the journal about someone who was at SpaceX and it seemed like they were somewhat low level but they, you know, through the IPO, they made enough money to, like, take a year off and just go travel the world. It was a cool anecdote but, yeah, I completely agree with you that, you can't last. If you're... If you lasted a year at SpaceX, you probably have the bug, the entrepreneurial bug, the you're gonna do something. So it's this funny paradox of that you have enough not to work maybe.

Speaker 3: Are you... Yesterday was a sort of a monumental day in math. Mhmm. A lot of people are kind of wondering how that's translating in real time to progress in in other domains. I'm wondering, are you are you getting surprised at all from from your customers at at at the kind of pace that they're making on the on the product side? Or are you still seeing companies where you're like, oh, at SpaceX, we would have done that in a month and and you took six months?

Speaker 5: Yeah. I mean, we help them do it in a month. That's what we're all about. I mean, testing at all these companies is critical path. And so, you know, if we we enable them to test like 50 times in a week instead of five times in a week. So, no, we're we're definitely part of the solution there to to enable them to move much more quickly and kind of... Also, I'd say our platform I think also encapsulates a lot of like a lot of these hard lessons learned to kind of help them go directly to to something that's very mature that they can just rip with.

Speaker 1: Fantastic. Sick. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

Speaker 3: I'm sure you'll have more...

Speaker 5: Yeah. One more thing. So we've got a LA Hard Tech event on October 15. I don't know if you guys... You guys have seen that...

Speaker 1: Everything's on October 15.

Speaker 9: Porsche's releasing

Speaker 1: a new car. Roadsters coming out.

Speaker 3: LA Hard

Speaker 1: Times. Is...

Speaker 3: You're really trying to steal your your former employees' thunder with

Speaker 5: their Roadsters. Yeah. Going up

Speaker 1: against Tesla. But who knows? That might be delayed. We don't know. It's it's been it's been shifting around. But this one's locked October 15. Tell

Speaker 5: us about October 15. It's it's with Zinger. So we've got the V Max and the Spider coming.

Speaker 1: He's gonna be... You come. Love I love Zinger. We we had the car here on the show. It's a...

Speaker 3: Yeah. Is Zynger Zynger is a customer then or you guys are just teaming up?

Speaker 5: Yeah. They are. Yeah. Awesome. They're... Yeah. It's it's been great so far. And and, it should be sweet. You know, invites open. It's on our LinkedIn if you guys wanna wanna check it out. But yeah, it should be

Speaker 9: a great event.

Speaker 3: Awesome, Dave. Well, great great update. Come back on before the end of the year. Yep. I'm sure you'll have more news. We'll talk to you soon. Awesome progress.