Helicon emerges from stealth with $16.5M to industrialize carbon fiber manufacturing for defense and drones

Speaker 1: And we have our first guest Alex. Here with us. Alex Bring him in. From Telecom. Welcome to the show. How are you doing? What's going on? Thank you so much for coming. Doing great. Doing great.

Speaker 4: Absolutely. Day

Speaker 1: coming out of stealth.

Speaker 4: Yeah. I mean What are you building? Long time coming for us. I think this has been almost four months since we got to fundamentally what the company is today. The team and everything... All the effort that's been going on behind the scenes were part of, obviously, a much, much larger part of everything that's changing in this country, which you've covered many, many times, and we're just part of that massive chain of of change. What were you doing before the four months of stealth started?

Speaker 1: Were you ideating or working for another company?

Speaker 4: Yeah. This has been... Spent probably a year ideating something completely different. My my cofounder, which I had a very different background by myself, I think we are the only company in sort of this industrial space, which is really a combination of frontier hardware, frontier robotics, frontier software altogether. And that led us to what Helicon is today, and so we're solving a problem in a very different way to what everyone else thinks to be the problem. And so we are scaling fundamentally extremely complex work Mhmm.

Speaker 1: And building models to do that in the in the long run, but doing it really money and raising money? I think Jordy wants to hit the ground. You raised some money?

Speaker 4: Yeah. So he raised $16,500,000.

Speaker 1: You

Speaker 4: know, the the money is the money is extremely important. It enables us to get to where we are. It's sort of... This building is where we went from. Blank slate, and this is all operations, engineering in our in our company that has gone from blank slate to first part made in twenty days. We had people tell us it couldn't be done in thirty, and there's a lot more that that we can do and that this team has done. We're incredibly small still, so to all the people that are listening to us for the first time, we're hiring like crazy, and we have a lot that we're building. And where are you guys based? We're based in Torrance. We're based in Fortis, LA, right next to a lot of our customers, which is the main reason. We have a building with more power than LA usually has, which is why everyone's sort of leaving and going to Texas. More power? Are you thinking about racking some GPUs anytime soon? We are looking at something tangential

Speaker 2: to that. But now our main focus really is dual use and defense. Sure. Wait. So sorry if I didn't catch this. You guys are doing the manufacturing but you're not doing the actual design of components and different parts going into these things. You're working with other companies that are... Have the end customer relationships and are are doing the r and d. You guys are just focused on making the best possible version of each component.

Speaker 4: Yeah. So think about it, like, there's magnets way down in the chain. Mhmm. There's actuator companies of which there's an infinity of by now. And then there's fundamentally the structure of the skeleton of a system that ultimately is what flies, moves, or what connects everything else, and we fundamentally do that. We focus on codesigning often with customers because that is is the default, and every manufacturing process you use will have different design limitations. We focus on our approach being extremely complex three d geometries, very similar to what you can mold with with plastic, not quite as extreme as three d printing of the norm in a small bamboo. But we can make parts that are extremely strong, six times stronger than plastic. There's a lot of cars that I know Jordy is a fan of from people that we have in common that fundamentally are today really limited to tens or hundreds of units that are made with a team of 12 people making sort of the structure by hand. Everything that we spend our time doing is understanding that the flow is build software so you can do the design phase called 10 times faster than what it is today, and then run industrial manufacturing processes that can actually do the same thing instead of being a week, but can do in thirty minutes. Yeah. And that's where you actually get to the scale of basic building out millions of systems. And for us, this facility is is really aimed to do that. So we went... Part of the seed round is is part of our ambition, which is not doing a five mill seed round, proving out a little bit, and then jumping to a much larger scale. Yeah. This building is around 40,000 square feet, and we'll we'll fill it. We'll be making millions of structures

Speaker 1: every year coming out of it. How do you actually make a drone structure out of carbon fiber? Like, mean, how do you even make, like, carbon fiber, like, hood for a car? Is that, like, a mold or is it, like, layered and then, like, filed down? Like, I I actually know so little about carbon manufacturing.

Speaker 4: You and so many other people, the reality is no one really knows. 99% of humans on earth are completely clueless to what carbon fiber really is. And the closest analogy that that we often bring up internally, but also particularly when when we hire and when we discuss what we're doing to people that, particularly in software, carbon fiber production of any part today is very similar to how blacksmiths used to make any metal part. Yeah. And what we're doing is basically taking the step that Carnegie and Bethlehem Steel took, which is industrializing a group of materials. And so that basically led to the naval fleets of World War two that fundamentally were one of the core reasons why this country won and sort of maintain the freedom that we all benefit from, and then skyscrapers and railroads. And so fundamentally, I mean, the the roadster that we all saw, that that core structure of that system is is a composite, and you would never be able to do that with a different group of materials. So when we're talking to companies that are making commercial drones that for the first time are actually going from prototypes of 10 to a 100 units and have manufactured it one way, We are now the solution to saying, okay. You're going from a 100 units to you need a million units a year. Well, this is the only way you do it. Yeah. Well, when I think of, like, a DJI,

Speaker 1: a tree or something, like, a six arm, you know, there's, like, a... It looks like a bunch of PVC pipes that are kinda, like, clicked together. Are you manufacturing rods and then assembling those, or is it all one structure that's in, like, a mold and you grow it? Or is it subtractive manufacturing where you start... You don't start with a block of carbon fiber and, like, whittle it down. Right?

Speaker 4: No. You don't. So exactly what you mentioned is what we think. We heard also when we were raising, and not to diss on anyone specifically here, but there were people who told us, look, drones look the way they do, and we're sort of at the the apex of innovation for drones in the future. And that's a little bit like saying that the first Ford Model t that came off the line was the end of design for all cars forever. Yeah. So we make molded parts that are a combination of generally commercial tubes and flat sheets that today could actually be one unique custom three d geometry done at speed and at scale. Mhmm. And the only reason why that is not the default is because you have nine to one yearly times. Mhmm.

Speaker 2: And the cost and... If you bring down the cost dramatically and bring down lead times dramatically, what are what are things in our everyday lives that you would use carbon fiber for that we don't today? It's like I... Exactly. In in a perfect world, I would everything in my life would be carbon fiber, personally. But but, yeah, what what are some applications that people just don't even explore today that that we might?

Speaker 4: Yeah. I think that's that's exactly right. You you sort of summarized how we describe the vision of where this company will go is like, what does industrialized composites actually mean? And the reason why I say composites instead of carbon fiber, it's like carbon fiber is just one specific type of fiber. The reality is that this complexity of designing, manufacturing, this complexity of the materials is what has kept all of this back. We're talking about unlocking a completely new way to create products that today are physically impossible or for companies that today are using normal plastics or normal forms of metal, replace them to have a competitive advantage in whatever market they're going for, whether that's commercial or defense. So if there's two companies competing for the same system, one uses our frame or one uses a traditional plastic injection molded frame, we will enable more range, more accuracy, more stiffness. Whatever fundamentally our customers are trying to optimize for, we enable.

Speaker 1: So you're thinking about, like like, beyond cars and drones, like, you gonna get, like, a refrigerator that's made out of carbon fiber? Because, like, a lot of fridges have a lot of metal and plastic in them. You could potentially replace that, and then when you swing the door open, it's not as heavy? Yeah. Things like that. I mean, anything that you want, something that that is like

Speaker 2: like some very light but damage, like damage resistance. Right? Or or stronger. Right? I mean, it just feels like, again, I think we'll look back on this era of, like, things are just made of plastic or they're made of metal. And, like... Yeah. Why why don't we have carbon fiber phones yet?

Speaker 4: There's there's many reasons. So fundamentally, it comes down to things like electrical conductivity Mhmm. And and many other things that particularly, carbon isn't ideal for, but there's composites that Interesting. Definitely be replaced for core parts of those structures. Sure. There's something that we... Right now is sort of medium term for us, but there's a lot of infrastructure that today is predominantly cement and not custom geometries, and it's just always the the same part. Particularly in data center build outs, there's a couple of conversations we've already looked at that. You know, our our fundamental mission really is to enable the West to keep and maintain its its dominance. So that's goal one. But our long term vision is what does industrialized composites look like in the world, and it won't be every single every single cup that you use for the rest of your life. Mhmm. But it's really about unlocking to mechanical and design engineers for the first time this option. Very cool. And an option to go from 10 units of a prototype to 50 units to 50 units again to then ramping up to a 100,000 units over the same year period. Yeah. Well, congratulations on the round and coming out of Stealth and everything you're doing. Thanks so much for your Very very cool. I'm gonna... Yeah. Make a... I'll make a request.

Speaker 2: Carbon fiber gong Carbon gong mallet. We actually... Break these all the time. We've broken a bunch of these. It's act... It's a real need. We are also swinging them quite a lot. And so having something that was a little bit lighter, bit faster Yeah. Add some diversity to the Gong hits would be fantastic. So we'll we'll... Our our people will reach out to your people. Yeah. That'd huge for us. That sounds perfect. Awesome. Great. Great to meet you, Alex. Cheers. Goodbye. Let

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